Accelerated OpenGL Graphics Adapter
Graphics adapter that supports OpenGL hardware acceleration. If your computer has an accelerated OpenGL Graphics Adapter, you can enable the Use 3D Hardware Acceleration option in the General subtab on the Graph property page. Enabling this option forces the 3D Graph control to render 3D graphs directly to the display adapter, which maximizes rendering performance.
Disabling this option forces the control to render 3D graphs to an off-screen frame buffer, which is then copied to the screen. The 3D Graph control caches this frame buffer and updates it only when the graph needs to be rendered (such as adding a plot or changing the view position). For complex 3D graphs, the time to render the image into the frame buffer greatly exceeds the time to copy the frame buffer to the screen. As a result, simple screen updates that do not require the graph to re-render (such as scrolling the page) execute very quickly.
The following table summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of enabling and disabling this option.
| Enabled | Advantages: | Faster rendering, uses less memory |
| Disadvantages: | Always renders the graph, even for simple screen updates | |
| Disabled | Advantages: | Fast redraw for simple screen updates |
| Disadvantages: | Uses more memory, slower rendering |