Finally, what people logically assumed the “Wireframe” slider does is implemented.
I still don’t understand what the purpose of the actual “Wireframe” slider is, aside from an interesting aesthetic. 
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The original reason is for performance I think. Having to draw all the edges with a very dense model used to be something you couldn’t do without it tanking your system. 
(yes this was very, very long ago)
I honestly think we don’t need it anymore. Users are just confused by it nowadays and I personally never use it; I always show all the edges. The transparency slider is very nice though! 
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Yup, 100%. If you want to see wireframe, you want to see wireframe, not maybe-some-part-of-wireframe-that-you-don’t-even-know-how-it’s-controlled-by-that-obscure-slider.
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That is based on angles of geometry.
The goal is not to show wireframe.
It is to have a 3D scene that can be inspected at lowest cost.
Lowest, the amount of edges to display is. Fastest, is running the viewport.
There was no slider in 2.79. And it does not really make sense to have one.
But I think that would be great to keep ability to have a display between only Bounding Box and full wireframe.
I think that an option to show marked edges in Object mode would be welcomed.
Edit : I forgot that outline was already there in Viewport Shading panel.
While they’re working on the overlays, maybe they could fix the normal display so that it reflects the custom normals. Would be nice to have that in Object mode too so they could reflect what modifiers do.
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I know what it’s based on. It’s still useless to me. I don’t want to not see wireframes. The whole point of looking at wireframes is to see how my geometry flows.
No. In current viewport, drawing speed “should” not depend on that slider. (Ironically though, it might be slower if your slider is not at 1.0, because of the special code path in the shader 
)
Oops. you are right. That point about performance does not make sense, anymore, if logic in 2.8 is no more the same as in 2.79.
The only thing that subsists is the idea of a scene more easily readable by a human eye. In that case, disabling X-ray in Wireframe mode seems sufficient.
Split Normals overlay should be showing custom normals in Edit mode, if you enable On Cage button of modifier.
But I agree that would be more intuitive for a workflow using modifiers to have an overlay relative to selected objects in Object mode.
Option could be added in Overlays panel or in modifier’s panel.
I thought the same but it is actually useful sometimes with imported CAD models.
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This is vital for working with some CAD models.
For some fields of 3d work, the topology isn’t actually that important, but the geometry sure is. I need to see the edge of the angled surface, not the spider web of infill triangles.
It’s a big difference between this:
and this:
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That makes sense. Wouldn’t a planar Decimate modifier at 0 angle do the same though?
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I guess it is a little bit more expensive ? And it can cause artefacts some times, especially if you end up with a ngon with holes in it, it probably won’t like it very much 
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Not really. Because you often don’t actually need a decimate for rendering. You only want to see what is going on in the scene.
The second thing is that CAD scenes often consist of thousands or tens of thousands of objects and it is obviously much faster to just turn down a slider than putting modifiers on thousands of objects.
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No, not much faster really, just select one, add the modifier, and Ctrl-L link modifiers.
Sounds like that slider is just covering for being unable to put a modifier on a collection.
But I get where you’re coming from.
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As a 3D printing user past month, would really like these type of wireframe display angle controls.
What you’re seeing here is a bug probably. It does work fine for me.
Anyway, there was this whole discussion about the slider on devtalk back when they were polishing up workbench for 2.80, and they wanted to do away with it then as well AFAIR, but didn’t because some people found it useful. No point retreading this methinks.
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I agree with @Stan_Pancakes .
Cavity can be satisfying in Solid mode.
And Decimate should be satisfying in Wireframe mode.
The modifier can be applied. So, that should improve performance.
It is not supposed to produce bugs and it currently should support Ngons without problem.
If there is such recurrent problematic with CAD models, best solution should probably be to have an option at import to decimate model.
That does not bring anything to keep ugly meshes inside blender.
Oh, decimation never works perfectly. It is usually not needed. Computers are fast enough these days to deal with the polygon load. It is just that it is difficult to read but the wireframe slider takes care of that.
Performancewise the number of objects is a much larger problem than the number of polygons. And in many cases, like importing step files, the importing workflow will take care of tesselation anyways which is probably much more effective than anything Blender could do with a quick automatic decimation on import.
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Shoutout for manually remodeling this component from a single image. 
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Nagonna draw the rest of the owl tho.
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