Continue to Site

Welcome to MCAD Central

Join our MCAD Central community forums, the largest resource for MCAD (Mechanical Computer-Aided Design) professionals, including files, forums, jobs, articles, calendar, and more.

FireGL V8650: Very sluggish line drawing

Jeff701

New member
I recently got a PC upgrade to an i7-960 CPU, Win7 64-bit, and an ATI FireGL V8650 2GB PCIe videocard.
Wildfire 4.0 M010, 32-bit.

The 3d performance is fine; it can manipulate complex models pretty smoothly, so it seems like the 32-bit Pro-E is working ok with the 64-bit OS.
The problem comes when it tries to render plain lines, either when I right-click a feature in the model tree and click "Edit" and it draws all the dimensions on the model, or else in drawing files. In drawing files, it is slow. Dragging a simple view with about 8 dimensions on it can take 7 seconds to finish the move. The FireGL card specs say that the card supports hardware-accelerated lines.

In config.pro, the Graphics mode is set to OpenGL.

I had a non-Quadro 9800GT 1GB card in the previous system (WinXP 32-bit), and it was a fair bit quicker in drawings, though there was still some lag when moving drawings. That card was not reused in the new system, as its RAM was starting to fail.

Before that, I was on an old Quadro 128MB card - its 3d performance was awful, but it was liquid-smooth in drawings.


Is there something that can be done to speed up this FireGL card? Some setting I'm missing?
 
I have a similar problem.
I have searched and searched but to no reveal.
I'm anxious to know how this problem can be solved.


Best regards,


John Bijnens
 
Some additional findings:
IT came down to help out with this. Process Explorer was used to monitor the xtop.exe process.
With OpenGL enabled, the CPU is barely affected when manipulating 3D objects, or when working on a drawing. However, the GPU is quite active, and is pegged at maximum usage while manipulating objects within the drawing view.

However, when the Graphics mode in Pro/E is switched to the Win32_GDI, the drawing view works perfectly well. Everything moves around quickly, and when drawing a spline, the spline follows the cursor around in near-realtime. But the 3D rendering is done in the CPU, and so it's quite slow.

So I've got one or the other at this point - 3D, or drawings. Still no leads as to the exact nature of the problem though.



Update: Of all things, it looks like it was the vertical sync setting in the ATI drivers. I set that to "Off, unless application specifies," and now it looks like everything's working fine. I guess Pro/E does something really bizarre when redrawing any 2D elements.



Edited by: Jeff701
 
It would be nice if the manufacturers of these cards would state what each setting does and how it affects other settings.
 
dross said:
It would be nice if the manufacturers of these cards would state what each setting does and how it affects other settings.
Well, I don't know how much this is on the videocard manufacturers. I don't recall ever having this kind of issue with vsync, though I'd be digging through years of memories of fussing with videocards and various games.

Maybe it should be more on PTC to have Pro/E forcibly disable vsync if this is a common issue, or if it can't, show a message that vsync is enabled, can't be disabled, and that it may cause some problems. That may be dependent on the videocard driver version though, and WF4 predates my V8650 by quite a bit.
Or the more drastic solution, but a more thorough one: Redo their screen redraw routines, or whatever code is applicable, in drawings so that it doesn't get so bogged down with vsync turned on.
 

Sponsor

Articles From 3DCAD World

Back
Top