[vtk-developers] OS X MultiSamples

[Sean McBride]

On Mon, 5 Aug 2013 16:41:22 -0600, David Gobbi said:

>For a long time, it has been a minor annoyance that VTK doesn't do
>antialiased rendering on my Mac.  However, I now have a project that
>requires it, so I dug into the code and I _think_ that I have a
>solution.  I added the following attributes in
>vtkCocoaRenderWindow::CreateGLContext():
>
>      NSOpenGLPFASampleBuffers,
>      (NSOpenGLPixelFormatAttribute)(this->MultiSamples != 0),
>      NSOpenGLPFASamples,
>      (NSOpenGLPixelFormatAttribute)(this->MultiSamples),
>
>Sample buffers supported in OS X since 10.2.  Is this safe on all OS X
>machines?  Is it possible that it could cause creation of the context
>to fail if the gfx card does not support sample buffers?

As I know next to nothing about OpenGL (VTK is my abstraction :)) I can't speak to this change really... but some thoughts:

- any performance change?
- won't test output be slightly different, possibly requiring new baselines?
- as it's a behaviour change, we should probably put this in release notes or somewhere
- since those flags have been there since 10.2, I imagine any GPU supporting 10.5 or later (VTK 6's requirement) will support it
- I can try this change locally, once I get my app working with VTK 6...

Cheers,

-- 
____________________________________________________________
Sean McBride, B. Eng                 sean at rogue-research.com
Rogue Research                        www.rogue-research.com 
Mac Software Developer              Montréal, Québec, Canada