Expedition Navigation Software 
1 of 1- samc99us
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OpenGL Support for ENC's
I'm looking for a method to improve Epedition's performance when rendering ENC's. Specifically, I'm using the NOAA ENC's as a test case, since the RNC's are going away. Generally, like I suspect many users here, I prefer to use the RNC's for the drastically faster load times. Unfortuantely, this bit me locally when the Army Corps moved a physical mark, and I didn't have updated RNC's. My fault in that case, but unfortunately this is going to become more commonplace when the RNC's go away.
I'm running a fairly modern laptop with relatively high performance graphics; its an AMD Ryzen Pro 5 6650U, updated drivers. I've tested back and forth between Expedition standard and Expedition 4D. Neither work smoothly or reliably on this data set.
I think a limitation is the OpenGL driver; that only appears to be activated when running a C-Map. Is there any way to get graphics accelerated rendering to normal ENC's?
Last edited by samc99us (2/23/2024 7:58 am)
- Nick
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Re: OpenGL Support for ENC's
Expedition useds DirectX & Direct2D for native rendering, which will in general offer higher performance than OpenGL under Windows.
It is only C-Map 4D that uses OpenGL. C-Map MAX rendering is done in the CPU.
I have optimised the ENC rendering as much as I can think of. The main issue is that there is a lot of data to render, some of it complicated. Expedition 12 will be a little faster with ENCs.
One possible performance aid is to turn off the chart quilting, then there may be fewer charts to load and render.
Simplified ENC boundaries may help a little, but that is the default.
- Nick
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Re: OpenGL Support for ENC's
To expand on that, I normally recommend Intel graphics. It always just works and has good performance with DirectX 11.
For example, I have an old (2020) Dell XPS with a 4 core 11th Gen CPU and integrated Xe graphics. It is just fine with ENCs.
One important thing is the memory available. Windows will work with 8GB, but it will be very slow due to paging etc. The XPS above has 16GB, which I would regard as the minimum requirement for Windows.
- samc99us
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Re: OpenGL Support for ENC's
Hi Nick,
Thank you for expanding on this. I'll play with disabling chart quilting and simplifying the ENC feature set so Expedition is loading less data.
I do agree with you that the Intel based graphics, maybe with a Nvidia GPU if you need it, do tend to "just work". We ended up with this AMD based solution for the new boat laptop as the reviews were superior on the new Thinkpads w/AMD over their Intel counterparts (faster, better battery life, and a bit cheaper). Unfortuantely I can't add memory to this particular machine, its soldered on.
Last edited by samc99us (2/24/2024 4:57 pm)
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Thread Starter- Nick
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Re: OpenGL Support for ENC's
How much memory does it have?