MATLABR2015a Opengl issue

Hi, I have a lot of issue with the graphic engine of R2015. First issue is I found all the plotting function is extreme slow than any of the previous version. My laptop only get about 40 bench mark score in this version while 80 in all the other versions. And the it's majorly because the score of the 2-D and 3-D plot. My cpu is i7-2620m with a HD3000 video card. I was also trying to make some transparent bar plot. I tried a lot of different configurations and codes, it just doesnt work. No matter I set the renderer to painter, zBuffer, opengl. And switch the opengl between hardware or software. Nothing changes. All I get is super slow plotting and totally no transparent object. I tried to follow this thread http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/213991-matlab-put-transparancy-on-a-bar-plot nothing worked. Until I tried the same code with R2014a, and everything works just fine. I think there are some low level graphic driver issue is going on with the R2015a, hope it will be fixed soon.

Answer 1

[Mike Garrity]

There are a number of different things going on here.

1) The bench program is only for comparing different machines with the same version of MATLAB. The bench program changes from release to release to benchmark new features that MATLAB is using. In particular, the 2D and 3D sections were changed completely in R2014b to make sure they were testing the features that the new rendering pipeline uses. You can't compare the numbers you're getting from that version with the numbers you're getting with earlier versions.

2) The Intel HD3000 has some "issues". As a result, we've blacklisted that chip and you should be getting a software implementation of OpenGL. Intel has been improving their drivers, and in R2015a we took some of their chips off the blacklist when they have the latest drivers installed, but I don't think that the HD3000 was one of the ones that has passed our qualification tests yet. You should run

opengl info

on system to figure out what drivers you have and whether you're getting the software implementation. You can then pass that info on to the support team, and they can figure out if there's a driver or MATLAB upgrade that would help.

3) What you're seeing with transparency doesn't sound related. As of R2014b, transparency is finally supported by all of the renderers and on all platforms. The one exception is the transparent sort in 3D that I discussed in this blog post. That depends on features which are not available on some systems. Your HD3000 is an example of a card which does not support that feature. But that feature is pretty subtle and shouldn't be affecting you here. It only affects depth sorted 3D scenes with multiple layers of overlapping transparency. I would suggest creating a MATLAB Answers question with some example code which shows the problem you're encountering.