EnSight provides various modes that control global viewing behavior. Three of these modes are discussed here: perspective/orthographic projection, bounding box display modes, and static lighting.

EnSight can display viewports in either perspective or orthographic projection. A perspective projection is how we normally view the world: objects that are farther away appear smaller. An orthographic projection removes this effect: objects appear the same size regardless of distance. The projection setting can be specified on a per-viewport basis.

By default EnSight draws every point, line, and polygon for every visible part each time the Graphics Window updates. For very large models (or slow graphics hardware), this behavior leads to unresponsive manipulations since the update lags behind the corresponding mouse motion. Fortunately, EnSight provides other display modes that improve responsiveness. Fast Display mode displays all visible parts in a reduced fashion during interactive manipulation. This can be a bounding box representation, a point cloud representation, a reduced polygon representation, an invisible representation, or if using immediate mode - a percentage of each part's elements. When the mouse button is released, parts are drawn normally. The Fast Display mode can also be set such that the bounding display is used until the mode is changed - even when the mouse is released. (Edit → Preferences... → Performance - Static Fast Display)

Surface shading operations are expensive for very large models. Since the shading is dependent on the orientation of the model with respect to the light sources, the surface colors must be recalculated each time the model moves. Static lighting mode precalculates surface colors for a given orientation and then uses these colors during subsequent transformations, resulting in improved interactive response.