The default graphics API for Open Inventor rendering is OpenGL. Since the version 3.2 of OpenGL, there are two available OpenGL context profiles:
- Compatibility profile: the context contains all the features of OpenGL, including the deprecated or legacy features
- Core profile: the context contains only non deprecated features. The default OpenGL profile in Open Inventor is the compatibility profile. However, if your application uses and requires the core profile, Open Inventor can be used by setting the environment variable OIV_RENDERENGINE_USE_GLCORE to 1.
As the core profile does not embed the deprecated or legacy features of OpenGL, using Open Inventor with this profile leads to limitations and unsupported features described below:
- Open Inventor Core features not supported: Tesselation shaders, 3D Texts (SoText3), Extrusion (SoExtrusion), Nurbs (SoNurbsCurve), Line styles pattern (SoDrawStyle::linePattern), SoCube in LINES style (see SoDrawStyle), Anti aliasing
- VolumeViz features not supported: Undefined Voxels, SoVolumeGeometry, SoHeightFieldRender, SoVolumeGroup, SoProjection, OrthoSliceBorder, SoOffscreenVolumeRender
- All shapes based on quads or polygon that are not triangle (e.g., SoQuadMesh, SoFaceSet)
- Multi viewer
- DialogViz
- RemoteViz H264 encoding