Hi! What’s new about this project? Unfortunately, there are no fresh Cheese builds for Windows to see, how blender becomes fast in viewports)) And, of course, I’m eager to see those realtime lens flares))
me to i will like to see videos of this project progress
-1 Gradiend background
+1 any Perfomance hardware acceleration
+1 Wireframe enhancement
+1 2.5d / Harware matcap mode
maybe
pre-selection (solid or outline)
antialiasing (or making small details visibility priority while zooming out)
@JustinBarret Wow I really like that idea. But it raises some questions. For example what’d happen when a big triangle is in 2 or more of those ranges you describe? Would you call 3 different fragment shaders for 1 triangle? How would you know where the border is? Still the idea in itself sounds plausible, I think it mostly relies on how the drawing architecture is written from the getgo.
But I am getting curious about viewportFX, it’s been quiet for some time now.
@Mcbuff, it would need to be sorted by BB, probably with a simple vector distance check based on visibility and clip distance…basically the same as lod stages in a game engine…
@aermartin: you mean appear thinner, they are already drawn 1px in width… 
@JustinBarrett I know, 
but it’s a big difference drawing with antialias : true ^^ if it’s even possible, should be it’s GL_ stuf (ie OpenGL code) …
I would also like to be able to change the AA setting of viewports from within Blender and not have to do it via the Nvidia control panel.
thanks for reading
me too. IMHO this is the most important project for blender.
NVIDIA control panel’s antialiasing is not looking good enough, even on x32 CSAA.
I think, Opengl can give viewport shaders and wireframe such as Sculptris have.
Same is about transparency mode/display. It is quite laggy right now, when Blender try to show transparent material, especially at low values of opacity.
Also, local transparent mode of selected objects could be very useful!
For example, 3dsmax has different modes of transparency display, and one of them is the cheapest - when transparent object is displayed “dissolved” - when only 30-40% of object’s pixels is displayed. Cheap and cute.
Can’t say I understand most of the more technical aspects, but just wanted to briefly pop in and add my support to this project! Viewport optimization and performance is one of the aspects that annoys me most (as well as having to disable modifiers on objects one at a time because of those slowdowns, but that’s beside the point).
JWilkins, I remember seeing your great improvements to the Sculpting tools* last year, so I’m pretty sure this will rock as well The improvements sound good already, can’t wait to try them out…anyway, good luck!
*started using them recently in the Dynamic Topology branch, and even though I’m no sculptor, the combination works great!
EDIT: posted in the wrong thread.
For me it has always been strange to have options in 2 panels… lower one, and the one on the right, where you can select glsl.
I like that when you choose cycles render, you don’t have that, all you have is nice menu with “material” and “rendered” options + default ones (texture, solid, wireframe).
Material view is good, because you see how your texture and material will look like, but no lighting there…
Then I always have missed an “x-ray” view… when everything is transparent, something like in edit mode, but without entering it… because sometimes you just need to look through your mesh or many mashes for a second.
Yeah, “global/local transparent mode”.
About wire - also wish transparecy of it.
On my mind, sculptris has got an excellent wire, and matcap shader by default. Guess, that global matcap mode also can increase perfomance.
For now, Sculptris display system (on the left) is looking more accurate:
that’s AA:ed , to the right i guess is blender… Im a fan of white/bright wire color
Actually, they are both antialiased =) But Sculptis wire is much thinner, and, it seems, it has transparency
A slight deviation from the original subject but while at Siggraph I saw some fairly tasty things coming out of autodesk. One of the personal favorites was this: http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/marcel/maya-directx-11-technology-preview
Directx in viewport. Here’s to hoping blender wont be too far behind (and by that i mean more than a year or two).
…but, isn’t DirectX Windows-only? That would mean that blender would have a chunk of code that’s Win-specific and incompatible with OSX, Linux and whatnot…seems to me this was already suggested further back in the thread, but more-or-less dismissed for this reason 
DirectX is Windows only, and part of Blenders strength is that it’s platform agnostic.
Well I wouldn’t mind Blender having DirectX support as long as there is an OpenGL/whatever-else-that-runs-cross-platform equivalent that is also actively maintained, I am certain that Blender won’t ever have support for it as it would be a pain in the ass to have to maintain two versions of the code. I would just be happy if there was some speed improvement to the viewport for now.