Introduction

MATLAB has three methods of turning information into on-screen pixels, called "renderers." You can change which renderer Rave uses by clicking the change renderer button near the top-left of the window. No single renderer is great for everything, so depending on what you are doing you may need to use this button to fix bugs or improve performance. The properties of the renderers are hard coded into MATLAB, and there is nothing we can do to improve them.

The three renderers are Painters, ZBuffer, and OpenGL. The default renderer in Rave is "Painters."

Painters

Painters usually works well, but it is bad at rendering 3D scenes. If you are using 3D graphs, you may need to change to ZBuffer or OpenGL. Painters is also the slowest renderer, so if you are working with complex graphics you may get better performance if you change to another renderer.

3D bugs

Painters often incorrectly draws 3D scenes so that objects that should be in the background end up in front. An example is shown here, where a surface plot of Rosenbrock's Valley is drawn incorrectly so that the peak near (-2,-2) seems to be behind the peak at (2,-2), even though the view angle of the graph clearly has (-2,-2) in the foreground.

Changing the renderer to ZBuffer fixes the bug: