# Particle display

This display object is responsible for rendering particles.

## Parameters

Shading mode

  Switches between a three-dimensional particles shape (normal shading) and a two-dimensional representation (flat shading).

Rendering quality

  This parameter controls the method used to render the particles. The following modes are available and affect only the rendering of spherical particles:

  Low

    Particles are rendered as texture-mapped imposters facing the viewer. Particles do not have depth in this mode, and intersections between spherical particles may not be displayed correctly. This mode is the fastest.

  Medium

    Particles are rendered as texture-mapped imposters facing the viewer. An OpenGL fragment shader is used to compute depth information for each rendered pixel to produce reasonable looking sphere-sphere intersections for overlapping particles.

  High

    Particles are rendered as true spheres using an OpenGL fragment shader, which computes the ray-sphere intersection for every rendered pixel.

  Automatic

    OVITO automatically switches between the three quality levels above depending on the number of particles to render in the interactive viewports. For less than 2,000 particles, the high-quality method is used. For more than 100,000 particles, the lowest quality mode is used. Irrespective of the particle number, high-quality mode is always used to produce a final output image.

Shape

  Selects the shape of particles. OVITO currently supports spherical and cubic particles. When flat shading mode is selected, they will be rendered as discs and squares, respectively.

Default particle radius

  Sets the particle size. This size parameter is only used if particles don't have a `Radius` property, and if no specific size has been set for individual particle types.