Edit:
My drivers had a Rhino profile with an 16X AA override.
I thought it was at default since it did not improve the AA as it should, in other words 2X AA looked like 2X and 8X looked like 8X, so disabling did not change anything other than the speed.
Now 100 redraws take 2.54 seconds with no AA and 3.7 at 2X AA… this doesn’t make too much sense.
Edit end
I wrongly opened a DWG in Rhino 4 and was surpirced by the redraw speed, so I did some testing in V5 and got a HUGE speed boost on meshes by turning off AntiAlias. I expected less than 2X speed improvements as AA has matured over the years, but I had never expected this.
On my laptop on a 280 mesh file with 1.6 million polygons:
Renderd Speed mode (no shadows, no advanced lighting)
I go from 14.9 seconds to 2.56 for 100 redraws (testmaxspeed) .
That is 6X faster! (edit: I can not reproduce the speed I had, so I have edited this)
In shaded mode it goes from 22 seconds to 7.7 seconds.
3x faster.
In wireframe it goes from 6.2 to 5.6, so this affects curves just a little bit.
All testes were done at 2x AA.
That is a MASSIVE difference. I don’t get that difference on the Quadro of course.
I now swapped to 8x AA and that is just as fast or even faster than 2x…
Shaded 19.6 seconds
Wireframe 6.2
Rendered Speed: 13.15
So this is just odd that 8x should be faster than 2x.
Any ideas @jeff ?