Set rgba channel in RenderWindow

[nathanletwory (Nathan 'jesterKing' Letwory)]

@Dan_Cascaval

Is there any chance of channel.SetValues being made faster, or another function exposed that can set the resulting values more directly?

This function is the fastest available for the buffer to set values.

From the managed world (C#, .NET) point of view there is not much to be done here. For RhinoCycles I also am using this approach, although I’m not pinning buffers, since that is in unmanaged world:

mcneel/RhinoCycles/blob/af5901de51ad79587a78e223778abcd5f6011078/RenderEngine.cs#L380

I haven’t done any profiling of this before, so lets take a look.

On my M2 Max at 2598x1678 it takes between 20 and 30ms for me, but not 50ms.

But on my Windows machine with Ryzen 9 7900X (12-core) it takes 5-6 times longer.

I hope there is room for improvement there. I logged a bug report to track that: RH-83576 SetValues on framebuffer slow.

@Dan_Cascaval

Should I be implementing this using something other than RealtimeDisplayMode?

No, that is fine.

@Dan_Cascaval

1. If there is absolutely no way around it: what’s the recommended way to implement this function from a C# plugin? Should we be using OpenTK? Is there any special setup that needs to be done, or perhaps an example you know of?

I don’t know, RhinoCycles hasn’t used OpenGL drawing in a long time, and I’m not sure in what state that particular mechanism is. But back in the day when it did there was a bit of C/C++ code that I PInvoked to do that.

Lets see if we can have @johnc or @andy make performance improvements in SetValues.