Some devices automatically switch between integrated graphics and dedicated graphics cards to render 3D graphics. Scene Viewer (and scene-based apps) work best with a dedicated graphics card; therefore, in your graphics card driver settings, make sure the per-application settings for your web browser are set to the dedicated graphics card. How you configure per-application settings for your graphics card will vary depending on the type and version of graphics card driver you use.

If you see benching (a step-like appearance of the elevation surface) in your elevation layer created from a cached elevation image service, you may need to lower the compression value and maximum error of the service when you publish to better match the resolution of the elevation data. You can configure these settings from ArcGIS 10.3 for Desktop or later.

Scene Viewer has a built-in hierarchy for ordering layers. The viewer displays your layers in the order listed below. Within each of these groups, you can order the layers in the scene.

1. 3D-enabled layers—This includes 3D data with z-values and 2D data that has an Elevation mode of Relative to ground or Absolute height.
2. Next, Scene Viewer displays dynamic map services and 2D feature layers with an Elevation mode of On the ground.
3. Finally, Scene Viewer displays hosted tile layers and cached map services.

For example, a dynamic layer of hurricanes always displays on top of a cached map service (tile layer) of population density even if the hurricane layer is at the bottom of Contents.

Often layers are released in ArcGIS Online before ArcGIS Enterprise. Here are Scene Viewer layer types with release information for ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online.

A layer may have too many features for Scene Viewer to display at one time due to performance reasons. When this occurs, a message appears in Scene Viewer warning that the layer is only partially drawn. To see the omitted features, zoom in and move around the scene.

3D symbology affects the number of features shown. Also, changing to complex 3D symbols, such as from cubes to trees, can cause fewer features to be drawn since trees require more vertices to be rendered.

Learn more tips to improve scene performance

Scene Viewer supports navigation for most gamepads and 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse devices. Support for navigation with devices other than a standard mouse depends on the operating system, browser, and device. The following are the supported devices by operating system and browser:

Windows

• Chrome—Gamepad (Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 4); 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse
• Firefox—Gamepad (Xbox 360, Xbox One)
• Edge—Gamepad (Xbox 360, Xbox One)

macOS

• Chrome—Gamepad (Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 4); 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse

The data used for hosted scene layers is large and complex; it can take a long time to publish and create caches for this data. If you find publishing scenes takes longer than the maximum usage time set on the portal's hosting server, increase the maximum usage time value. The default time is 60 minutes.

This happens if you defined colors and textures for the z-values of both exterior and interior surfaces in your multipatch data. Be sure the data does not have different colors and textures defined for exterior and interior surfaces.

You must use absolute elevation values from the geometries' z-values when publishing multipatch data. To correct this, use the Layer 3D to Feature Class geoprocessing tool in ArcMap to create a new multipatch feature class that uses an absolute height and republish the scene layer from the new multipatch data.

As mentioned in Tasks to perform after you create a data store and Manage data store backups, ArcGIS Data Store should be configured to output backup files to a machine separate from the ArcGIS Data Store installation. If the ArcGIS Data Store administrator did not do this and you find your hosted scene layer tile caches take too much room on the ArcGIS Data Store tile cache data store machine, change the scene tile cache location to a shared location on a separate server. The ArcGIS Data Store administrator can use the changenosqldatalocation utility to designate a shared directory. Hosted scene layers published after you change the output directory will store their caches in the new location.

The backup size grows with the amount of data you have in your layers and the number of hosted layers you publish. If you find you are running out of disk space on your backup machine, the ArcGIS Data Store administrator should adjust backup frequency, retention times, or both.

Note that tile caches for individual scene layers do not change. If you infrequently publish hosted scene layers, the ArcGIS Data Store administrator can disable automatic backups and manually create backups of only the relational data store. The ArcGIS Data Store administrator can use the updatebackupschedule utility to stop the automatic creation of backups, and use the backupdatastore utility to manually create full backups of the relational and tile cache data stores.