Graphics hardware acceleration

Group Explorer uses your computer's graphics hardware to accelerate the rendering of three-dimensional views, in the same way that video games and CAD tools do. Many graphics cards have a limitation on the number of different views they can handle simultaneously. For this reason, you may notice slower rendering times if you have several Cayley diagrams or objects of symmetry open simultaneously. That is, you will get fewer frames per second (less smooth motion) as you rotate the views, for example.

This is particularly significant if you have a sheet with many Cayley diagrams or objects of symmetry on it. You will notice that the sheet takes a very long time to load and manipulate. Therefore some links in Group Explorer have warnings next to them indicating that clicking the link to create a certain type of sheet may be prohibitively slow.

The reason for this is that when the load becomes too much for the graphics card, your operating system takes over the role of the graphics card, which enables you to have as many views as you like, at the cost of speed. What was formerly done via hardware (fast) is then done by software (slow).

This is a limitation that Group Explorer could work around by fooling the graphics card into thinking that all open views were really just one view, by swapping them in/out quickly. But this feature is not yet implemented, because the priority is rather low.