Viewport settings
This page of the application settings dialog contains options related to the interactive viewports of OVITO.
Camera
- Coordinate system orientation
OVITO can restrict the viewport camera rotation such that the selected Cartesian coordinate axis always points upward. Default: z-axis.
- Restrict camera rotation to keep the major axis pointing upward
This option constrains the camera’s orientation to prevent the camera from turning upside down.
Viewport background
This option changes between a dark (default) and a white viewport background.
Viewport 3D graphics
These settings apply to all interactive viewports and are stored in the configuration file of OVITO on your computer. Changes take effect immediately in all viewport windows.
- Renderer
Selects the rendering engine used for the real-time display of the scene in the interactive viewports. Besides the Standard renderer, OVITO Pro provides the VisRTX renderer , which requires NVIDIA hardware with ray-tracing capability. The same choice is also available in the Viewport Renderer submenu of the viewport menu and on the Renderer tab of the rendering page.
The settings of the selected engine (e.g. ambient occlusion and shadows of the Standard renderer) are part of the current session and are edited on the Renderer tab of the rendering page. If the same engine is used for rendering output images, the interactive viewports display the scene with exactly the same settings.
Note
The VisRTX renderer is included in OVITO Pro for Windows and Linux. OVITO Basic only provides demo versions.
- 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). If several GPUs of the same model are installed, their names are numbered (#1, #2, …) to tell them apart.
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): OVITO uses the first adapter in the Vulkan driver’s enumeration order that can display the viewport windows. 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.
On Linux, a GPU that cannot display the viewport windows – for example, a second GPU that the display is not connected to – is not used for the interactive viewports even if selected here. OVITO falls back to an adapter that can.
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.
- System information
Opens a window displaying technical information about your computer system and the graphics hardware, which is useful when reporting a problem to the OVITO developers.
The command of the viewport menu opens this page of the application settings dialog directly.