Release Notes
Tecplot Focus 2025 R2
Maintenance Release 1

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 Focus 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 Focus 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 Focus (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 Focus 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 Focus’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 Focus’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 Focus, 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.