Question about transparent materials

When I use Rhino 6.26, objects made of transparent materials may be transparent only in Rendered mode and Raytraced mode. In other viewport display modes they are always opaque regardless of transparency setting in the Materials panel. Is this a feature, or a bug?

I use Quadro K2000M graphics card and NVIDIA driver 426.32, 2019-11-17.

Rendered and Raytraced are the only display modes that use rendering materials.
The other display modes like Shaded use layer color.
Ghosted uses Layer color with a built in translucence.
X-Ray uses Layer color with full transparency.

How is it you don’t know that after all these years running Rhino?

Rhino and other professional CAD programs are difficult to learn. I expected transparency in the Shaded mode… By the way, I am not the only one. I have noticed that Kyle Houchens and Brian James make similar mistakes.

Well, now you know.
Shaded is opaque.
Ghosted is the transparent mode you’re probably after.

There is no CAD industry consortium to standardize on anything.

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Gee, @John_Brock aren’t you being a little testy with Andrew? We all know he’s been around almost as long as you have and with that knowledge I, at least, took his inquiry to be something a little deeper than you seemed to assume.

The basic viewport mode concept is an artifact of the prehistoric era before modern OpenGl and graphics cards with, as Carl Sagan might have said, “Billions of processor cores”. It is still a fundamentally sound concept, but I took Andrew’s post as floating the idea that with today’s graphics capabilities perhaps the available modes and/or the feature set of existing modes could be modernized. Shaded mode should continue to exist because there are circumstances where it’s quite useful. I think Andrew is suggesting that some of the other modes could still operate as they do today but additionally respect material transparency for those objects that have a transparent material assigned. Essentially a hybrid of “by object by material” and what they do now.

I may be reading more into Andrew’s post than he actually intended, and if so I apologize.

As you suggest ghosted is very useful, so useful in fact that I have an additional one that I use a lot named “Ghosted 50%” which is a little more transparent than the standard Ghosted and useful in a lot of situations where the standard doesn’t quite do the trick.

Andrew, here is a bunch of information about configuring display modes: https://wiki.mcneel.com/rhino/6/advanceddisplay

Hopefully it helps.