Hello, and thank you to the community for supporting such an important software as GNU Octave.

I am a user of GNU Octave and a lecturer at the university, where I am trying to teach students to use this free software in their engineering practice. Therefore, for me as a user, it is most important to have stable performance on any computer, and especially on laptops.

However, there are people who are professional programmers and can create new versions of Octave, fix bugs in the code, and for them it is of most importance to provide users with flexibility and fast rendering of graphics.

In my opinion, the better choice is to include a small message in the installer options explaining the pros and cons of Software OpenGL and System OpenGL (as well as the same for the BLAS library implementation), just give more information than now. I believe this is not a difficult task, but the improvement is significant: users will know, for example, that Intel HD graphics may cause problems, and they will have the option to choose a slower but more stable software renderer (and switch between renderers at any time if desired) based on the information and explanation provided during the installation process.

Because I myself (and it may be due to my own lack of knowledge) only became aware of the difference between Software OpenGL and System OpenGL, and the possibility to switch between them after installation, after experiencing several crashes and only finding out about it on this forum.


комментарий №11:

> It is possible that Octave is doing something wrong somewhere. But  the issues seem to be limited to Intel graphics. (At least, that's what I gathered from the reports we got during the last year or so.) So, it is also possible that the issue is with the OpenGL implementation that is vendored by Intel.
> Software rendering can be multiple orders of magnitudes slower for some complex scenes than hardware rendering. In my strong opinion, we shouldn't let all users suffer from potential deficiencies in probably only some vendored OpenGL implementations.
> Additionally, we got reports from some users for which the software OpenGL libraries caused crashes. That is another strong reason for not defaulting to software OpenGL imho.
>
> All in all, we shouldn't change the default for the Windows installer to software OpenGL in my opinion.
>

(Thanks Dmitri, + nomarkup+  _opengl_info_ was the command I referenced in comment #4 as forgotten by me :-) )

> What do you get for:

There you go:

>> __opengl_info__.vendor
ans = NVIDIA Corporation
>> __opengl_info__.renderer
ans = GeForce 210/PCIe/SSE2
>> __opengl_info__.version
ans = 3.3.0
>>

It makes sense as the old Geoforce card is attached to the primary monitor.

on my system with issues that also has dual intel/nvidia chips

>> __opengl_info__.vendor
ans = Intel
>> __opengl_info__.renderer
ans = Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe Graphics
>> __opengl_info__.version
ans = 4.6.0 - Build 31.0.101.5333

So, would it be possible for the NSIS installer to detect Intel graphics and set the OpenGL variant to the appropriate default? We might catch the majority of cases there.

Then again, my desktop has 2 graphics cards, an Intel and an old NVidia, each attached to a single monitor. You'd wonder how that would behave ... (up til now I never had any issues with HW OpenGL).

It is possible that Octave is doing something wrong somewhere. But  the issues seem to be limited to Intel graphics. (At least, that's what I gathered from the reports we got during the last year or so.) So, it is also possible that the issue is with the OpenGL implementation that is vendored by Intel.
Software rendering can be multiple orders of magnitudes slower for some complex scenes than hardware rendering. In my strong opinion, we shouldn't let all users suffer from potential deficiencies in probably only some vendored OpenGL implementations.
Additionally, we got reports from some users for which the software OpenGL libraries caused crashes. That is another strong reason for not defaulting to software OpenGL imho.

All in all, we shouldn't change the default for the Windows installer to software OpenGL in my opinion.

As far as i remember SW driver was default prior to 7.1 release.
During the 7.1 release there were issues with SW driver
(may be this one
https://octave.discourse.group/t/installed-7-1-0-on-win-10-with-installer-plots-dont-display/2536/16
I remember there were other threads, but cannot find them on discorse, perhaps they were on bug list) which made Markus to switch to HW driver by default since the issues with SW were deemed more severe (like octave crashing vs plot not showing).

For the record -- I think we should make SW driver the default
and keep SW/HW switcher as a backup option.

Dmitri.
--

To me the problem here looks to be that is seems to depend on system HW and SW.  But it can be argued that most if not all other SW on affected systems work fine, so why not Octave?

But we did supply a SW OpenGL 'driver' for Octave, even set as default in the Windows installers, that should and AFAIK does circumvent these issues.
Should we more firmly discourage use of 'System OpenGL'?

i don't use the exe installer, but the zip/7z archives have the software rendering .dll in place

forgot to add, I can reproduce this on some systems but not others.  both an old laptop and an aging desktop with Intel HD Graphics 4600 works just fine.   A newer system with both Intel Iris Xe Graphics, driver version 31.0.101.5333 and NVIDIA T550 GPU driver version 30.0.15.1236 crashes.

Have you tried to set OpenGL to SW-based? there is a utility to switch between HW- and SW-based rendering: OpenGL Switcher in the Start Menu in Octave's directory.