Release Notes
Tecplot 360 2025 Release 2

The most significant benefit of the new Vulkan-based rendering engine is a substantial increase in graphics performance across all platforms. All users should notice faster, smoother visualization, especially when working with large datasets or complex scenes that previously pushed the limits of graphics cards.

These improvements can be felt in many aspects of interaction, such as rotating, zooming, and panning views. An easy way to quantify them is by measuring frame rate performance during view transformations. A quantitative comparison has been performed for various datasets and compared to the previous release. Some speedup examples are summarized in the chart below.

This release introduces GPU-accelerated Order Independent Transparency (OIT), a modern rendering technique that not only produces accurate transparency for a high number of overlapping surfaces but also delivers substantial performance gains.

Previous Tecplot 360 releases continuously sorted the scene elements on the CPU to achieve the transparency effect during interactive rotations. This became a bottleneck for large meshes with many overlapping surfaces and resulted in incorrect plots when rotated too far as it caused the sorted elements to be rendered in the wrong order. In addition, intersections between surfaces were processed per-triangle instead of per-pixel even though only a portion of a triangle may be below another (see figure below).

By moving transparency compositing onto the GPU and performing it at the pixel level, Tecplot 360 can now handle far more layers of transparency per pixel without lag. Rotations and zooms remain smooth even with transparency-heavy scenes. Transparent iso-surfaces and contour planes appear cleaner, with fewer visual artifacts. Large 3D datasets that previously felt “heavy” when translucency was enabled are now much more responsive.

No rendering technique is perfect, particularly when designed to succeed on the wide range of environments supported by Tecplot 360 (discrete, integrated or virtual GPU, software rendering on the CPU). When rendering scenes that are pushing your system to its graphics limits (very large resolution, hundreds of overlaid faces, etc.), transparency artifacts may appear, taking the form of “noisy” or “grainy” rendering, with pixels showing what could seem like arbitrary colors (see example below).

Such artifacts are more likely to appear during view transforms, as Tecplot 360 will temporarily reduce the number of transparent layers being ordered to prioritize performance. Once the view transform is complete, the number of sorted layers will be raised to prioritize image quality again.

Another artifact can look like portions of a transparent surface are disappearing.

If you experience any of these problems, you may adjust one or more of Tecplot 360’s three new OIT configuration settings found in the tecplot.cfg file located in the top-level directory of your installation. New values will take effect on the next startup of the application.

This sets number of fragments sorted during interactive view changes. Default: 128. Valid range: 1 to 1024. Must be less or equal to MaxSortedFragmentCount. Lower this setting for smoother view changes. Raise it for higher quality.

This sets number of fragments sorted when the view is stationary. Default: 1024. Valid range: 1 to 4096. Lower this setting for a faster fixed view. Raise it for higher quality.

This sets size of the memory buffer (in MiB) used to sort fragments. Default: 512. Valid range: 10 to 10000. If portions of transparent surfaces are disappearing or if raising MaxSortedFragmentCount has no effect, try increasing the size of the memory buffer. As a general rule, it is recommended to keep it well below the dedicated memory of your GPU.

This release introduces two new lighting effects, Smooth and Smooth with Creases, as a replacement for Gouraud. It also includes improvements to Paneled for better performance. Starting with this release, options include:

Images below show each of Tecplot 360’s lighting effects on more detailed Zones.

Finally, the figure below shows a comparison between Gouraud, available in previous releases, and Smooth, which is now leveraging Phong lighting. The difference is particularly visible with Specular Highlights ON, when zooming in closely on a surface or when working with coarse meshes.

Rendering of scatter symbols has been drastically improved in this release of Tecplot 360, particularly the rendering of sphere symbols (480x faster for the case reported in the section above). In this release we introduce a new SphereScatterRenderQuality setting: FAST, which is also the new default.

The rendering quality of spheres may be changed in the Tecplot configuration file (tecplot.cfg) using this command:

GPU-based vector arrowhead billboarding keeps vector arrowheads visually clear by rendering each arrowhead as a camera-facing shape computed on the GPU. Instead of using fully modeled 3D arrowhead geometry, Tecplot 360 orients the arrowhead flat to the screen so it always faces the viewer, maintaining a consistent silhouette and readable shape regardless of camera angle. Because orientation and sizing are handled per arrow in GPU shaders, this approach scales efficiently to large vector fields, improving both performance and visual legibility, especially during interactive rotation.

This release upgrades our anti-aliasing technology by replacing the older Super-Sampling Anti-Aliasing (SSAA) method with Multi-Sampling Anti-Aliasing (MSAA). While SSAA produced smooth edges, it did so at a significant performance cost by rendering scenes at higher resolutions and then downscaling.

MSAA achieves similar edge-smoothing quality with a far more efficient approach. The result is sharper, cleaner images with much lower GPU load, allowing users to enjoy smoother visuals without sacrificing rendering speed.

By default, a sampling level of 4 is used for both interactive and offscreen rendering (used to save images and animations). It provides a good balance of performance, GPU memory and quality. For users who still want control over the MSAA sampling level, two new settings are available in the Tecplot configuration file (tecplot.cfg), located in the top-level directory in your installation. These values will be checked at startup.

This sets the number of desired multi-samples used for on-screen rendering. The range of values are powers of 2 between 0 and 64. If a value of 0 or 1 is supplied, no multi-sampling is performed. Larger values of multi-sampling produce smoother lines but require more GPU memory, which may not be supported on your GPU. The default value is 4.

This sets the number of desired multi-samples used for off-screen rendering. Identical to the setting for on screen rendering otherwise.

The figure below shows their effect on a close-up view. Values above 4 produce only a very subtle change, which is why it has been selected as the default.

Close-up view of MSAA level 1, 2, 4 (default) and 8 (from top to bottom)

Built on the Vulkan API, the new graphics engine delivers consistent performance across multiple platforms and hardware configurations. Vulkan’s wide industry support—from GPU and driver vendors to operating systems—ensures reliable rendering whether running on Windows, Linux, or macOS. We recommend keeping your graphics drivers up to date, as Vulkan continues to evolve through active development.

Windows systems support Vulkan out of the box. On macOS, Tecplot 360 uses a runtime library that maps Vulkan to Apple’s Metal graphics framework. On Linux, Vulkan support depends on the distribution—if it’s not already installed, you may need to add the appropriate Vulkan packages or drivers manually.

To help you quickly confirm Vulkan compatibility and version details, the Help → About Tecplot 360 panel will display your system’s runtime environment information after a first plot has been rendered.

If your system has multiple GPUs, you can select the one being used by Tecplot 360 thanks to a new setting in the Tecplot configuration file (tecplot.cfg):

The default setting is is -1, indicating that Tecplot chooses. GPU numbers range from 0 to <numdevices>-1.

The same can be achieved with the command line option --gpu-number <integer>.

Software Rendering is supported through Mesa’s LLVM driver. Naturally, this will be much slower than running with Hardware Rendering, but may be a valid workaround when a GPU is not available or has buggy drivers.

On Linux, you can force Tecplot 360 to use Tecplot’s LLVM Mesa Vulkan drivers by using the --mesa command line option. For RedHat 8 in particular, the default Linux drivers do not support Mesa and this will be the only option for using software rendering.

Tecplot 360 is built, tested, and fully supported only on the following operating systems and platforms. The software may also run on operating systems similar to the ones listed here, especially later releases of the same platforms, but our ability to provide support for such installations may be limited.

Your account must have administrator rights on your computer to install Tecplot 360, or else right-click the installer and choose "Run as Administrator."

Enjoy Tecplot 360 2025 R2 and master the view.

My Tecplot is Tecplot’s one-stop portal that allows you to download software, manage your license keys, and more. Visit it at My Tecplot.