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The Camera View, 3-D View, and Perspective View all display 3-D imagery. The Perspective View is always displayed using the OpenGL rendering system. (The camera view is trickier to draw than the perspective view, because the camera view dynamically distorts the 3D geometry.) The camera and 3-D views can be rendered using OpenGL, the operating system's built-in graphics (GDI on Windows, Cocoa on Mac), or a software-based custom SynthEyes rendering engine. Each method has strengths and limitations:
OpenGL draws anti-aliased (pretty) lines, handles opacity and texturing, and is fairly fast; but it is not that fast at displaying shot imagery. OpenGL is sensitive to your particular graphics cards; low-end integrated graphics may not perform that well.
OpenGL is used by default on macOS and Linux.
GDI on Windows is very fast at displaying shot imagery, but bogs down on large meshes, isn't very pretty, and doesn't handle various amenities. For pure RAM playback, it is very good.
The built-in graphics on macOS and Linux are capable, but not particularly speedy. Generally the OpenGL renderer is used on those platforms.
The SynthEyes renderer accelerates (only) the 3-D mesh drawing that the built-in GDI graphics methods handle poorly. By using vector optimization and parallel processing, it can be very quick, faster than OpenGL in some cases, though it does not handle antialiasing, texturing, or opacity. You might also see some shimmering in dense scenes, as "ties" for pixel color are resolved depending on the particular order that your processor cores do the work. For handling large meshes, especially on Windows, using GDI plus the software assist may be a more productive choice than OpenGL.
Important : there are often large performance differences between different graphics modes, such as whether back faces are shown, or wireframe vs solid renders (solid is faster!). Options such as shadowing can greatly increase render time on with large meshes. Be sure to consider what you need.
You can change methods depending on what you are doing at any particular time using the settings on the View menu and the corresponding Preferences (for new scenes).
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