MATLAB 5.3.0 Patch Released June 4 1999 Release Notes for R11 Patch

Purpose of Update
This release provides important bug fixes to the OpenGL rendering capabilities of MATLAB and allows the autoselection of the OpenGL renderer when MATLAB is launched.

Renderer Autoselection
If your system has graphics hardware that supports OpenGL, you can set the Renderer property of your figure window to opengl to improve the drawing performance. This patch enables MATLAB to automatically select a graphics renderer based on the contents of the figure window if supported hardware is identified.

With the addition of OpenGL, MATLAB supports three renderers - Painters, Zbuffer, and OpenGL. The figure's RendererMode property must be set to auto (the default) for autoselection to occur. See the figure reference page, which can be accessed from the Help Desk, for more information on the Renderer and RendererMode properties.

Autoselection Criteria
For the rendering of complicated graphics, such as those containing surfaces or patches created with polygons, MATLAB selects the renderer that draws the scene the fastest, When a certain level of complexity is reached, MATLAB selects the Zbuffer renderer over the Painters renderer so that the figure will be generated faster.

The addition of OpenGL to the rendering options provides a higher level of performance for certain scenes. MATLAB typically selects OpenGL for scenes that meet the following criteria:

Enabling and Disabling Autoselection of OpenGL
The opengl command enables you to control whether MATLAB includes OpenGL in the autoselection process by specifying one of the following options:

	neverselect	Never select OpenGL (default)
	advise	Print a one time message to the command window advising that OpenGL could have been selected, but MATLAB did not select it
	autoselect	Include OpenGL in the selection process
	info	Prints information with the version and vendor of the OpenGL software on your system. The returned argument is a boolean that you can use to determine programmatically if OpenGL is available on your system.

The selection of one of these modes does not persist across MATLAB sessions. In order to have the opengl command issued in each MATLAB session, you must add a call to opengl in your startup.m file. For example, adding the command:

opengl autoselect

to your startup.m file causes MATLAB to always include the OpenGL renderer in the autoselection process.

Manually Enabling OpenGL
Setting the OpenGL selection mode specifies whether OpenGL should or should not be considered as a renderer option, it does not explicitly set the renderer to opengl. You can do this by setting the figure's Renderer property to opengl:

set(gcf, 'Renderer', 'opengl')

Issuing this command changes the renderer for the current figure to opengl. For more information, type doc figure_props at the MATLAB command line and scroll to the Renderer property description.

Contents of This Patch Release
This patch release includes the following files (where $MATLAB is your MATLAB root directory, and $ARCH is your machine architecture):

	On Windows:
		$MATLAB/bin/glren.dll $MATLAB/toolbox/matlab/graphics/opengl.m $MATLAB/Readme.opengl
	On UNIX (except Silicon Graphics, Silicon Graphics R8000, and IBM RS6000):
		$MATLAB/bin/$ARCH/glren.so $MATLAB/toolbox/matlab/graphics/opengl.m $MATLAB/Readme.opengl $MATLAB/sys/opengl/lib/$ARCH/libMesaGL.so $MATLAB/sys/opengl/lib/$ARCH/libMesaGLU.so
	On Silicon Graphics, Silicon Graphics R8000, and IBM RS6000:
		$MATLAB/toolbox/matlab/graphics/opengl.m $MATLAB/Readme.opengl $MATLAB/bin/$ARCH/glren.so