The shading performed by FeatureCAM translates surfaces into triangles for shading. Smooth shading indicates that the shading of the triangles should be blended. With this turned off, the individual triangles will be visible.
Smooth Line will smooth out the jagged edges of lines. This applies to all line drawings including toolpaths. Note that this option can be time consuming.
Dithering is a setting applicable to shading with 256 colors. This mode is not recommended, but if you have only 256 colors, Dithering will use a dot pattern to simulate having more colors.
Z Buffer will sort the surfaces by their depth. It is not recommended that you turn this setting off.
Z Buffer Lines allows the lines to be sorted along with the surfaces. This allows surfaces to occlude lines that are positioned behind. This option is provided for viewing toolpaths in conjunction with shaded surfaces.
Backface Removed hides surfaces whose normals point away into the screen. For solid models, this option will speed up the shading. If portions of the model are visibly missing, turn this option off.
Use graphics hardware attempts to use your graphics card to speed up shading. Many graphics cards are not reliable for shading. If your shading looks bad or performs slowly, turn off this setting.
Backface Lighting applies when depth cue is off. It duplicates the light vectors in back of the model (for diffuse lighting).
Backface Highlight applies when depth cue is off. It duplicates the highlighting affects for the duplicate lights.
Dither smooths the shading across the part. With this setting turned off, discrete bands of shading are often evident.
Z-buffer rubberband controls whether rubberband geometry are z buffered. Rubberband geometry are the forms of geometry that are interactively updated, like when you are dragging a circle radius.