Viewport graphics configuration

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Added in version 3.11.1.

How to open the configuration dialog:

Select the Configure Graphics… command from the viewport context menu.

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Changes you make in this dialog will immediately take effect in all viewport windows of the application.

GPU adapter

On systems with more than one GPU, this option lets you choose which graphics device OVITO uses for rendering the interactive viewports and for producing output images. The drop-down list shows all physical adapters detected by the graphics driver, along with their type (Integrated / Discrete / Software).

Selecting (Default) leaves the choice to the underlying graphics API:

  • Windows (Direct3D 12): DXGI enumerates adapters in performance order, so the default is normally the highest-performance discrete GPU.

  • Linux (Vulkan): the Vulkan driver defines the enumeration order. In practice, hardware devices appear before software renderers (e.g. lavapipe), but the relative ordering of multiple hardware GPUs (e.g. integrated vs. discrete) is driver-dependent and not guaranteed. When in doubt, select an adapter explicitly.

Note

On macOS, adapter enumeration is not available because Apple’s Metal API always selects the GPU automatically; the adapter drop-down is therefore disabled on that platform.

Real-time rendering method

This option selects the rendering backend to be used for the interactive 3D viewports. OVITO currently provides two options: the Standard renderer and the VisRTX renderer , which requires NVIDIA hardware with ray-tracing capability.

Note

The VisRTX renderer is included in OVITO Pro for Windows and Linux. OVITO Basic only provides a demo version.

Settings management

OVITO manages two sets of render settings: one for the interactive viewports and one for final-frame rendering of high-quality output images and movies. The settings in this dialog apply to the interactive viewports only (real-time rendering). You can use the Copy settings… function to copy the current settings to the final-frame render settings and vice versa.

Real-time render settings are shared between all viewport windows and get stored in the application’s configuration file. Final-frame render settings get stored in session state files.

For further information on the parameters of the available real-time viewport renderers, please see the respective documentation pages: