How to improve the performance of the software based opengl implementation in the newer releases of Matlab?

We utilize thin clients in our environment that do not support OpenGL. With the changes made to Matlab to use the software based opengl for clients that do not support the hardware based version, users are very frustrated with the performance of Matlab versus older releases that did not have this requirement. Is there any way to improve the performance? Users are running Matlab on RHEL6 servers.

[Vivek Jadye]

Hi Carlton,

Could you please elaborate a bit more on use cases where you are seeing slowdown? Specifics that could help answer your question are

• MATLAB version you use
• Type of MATLAB graphics use cases. 2D vs 3D plots,etc.
• Is it mostly animation or interaction?

Answer 1

[Yair Altman]

Using hardware acceleration is obviously better than using the software emulation. You might discover, as I have on my laptop, that simply updating the computer's display driver might cause Matlab (after restart) to recognize the driver and use its hardware acceleration.

Even if hardware acceleration is not possible, you can still employ numerous techniques to speed up graphics processing. Some of these ideas are outlined here:

1. http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/plot-performance
2. http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/plot-liminclude-properties
3. http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/performance-scatter-vs-line
4. http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/some-performance-tuning-tips
5. http://undocumentedmatlab.com/books/matlab-performance (a book I wrote)
6. http://mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/techniques-for-improving-performance.html
7. http://mathworks.com/help/matlab/graphics-performance.html