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Back to the Graphics Cards...Again

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Eltron

Eltron

Mechanical
Mar 3, 2005
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Recently I've been having a problem that essentially makes SW not usable, which (as you might suspect) is not a good thing. The problem that I am having is that the viewport in SW freezes whenever I attempt to work on or even open anything. The program doesn't frag itself. All of the menus, shortcut keys, feature manager selections still work. I can even save what I'm working on. If I didn't need to see what I was designing then the software would be just fine. I guess I should just quit whining, right? Anyway, if I select the "Use Software OpenGL" option, I don't have the issue, but then I loose the graphics acceleration that I need. If I dial the acceleration on my card all the way to nil I'm OK, too.

Before we go too much further, here are some relevant specs:
nVidia Quadro FX 560
SW '09 sp 3.0
Win XP 32bit

SW shows the graphics card is certified. I've tried all of the recommended drivers, plus some that aren't recommended. Did a repair install on SW. Upgraded to the new SP. No dice. Looks like all fingers are pointing to the graphics card for some reason. I'm thinking that either it shat the bed or it just doesn't cut the mustard for '09 with high-res. So far the VAR hasn't offered me a eureka moment.

Anyway, I was looking through this thread: and it seems like a new nVidia Quadro is going to be the way to go. However, when I checked the benchmark here: it seems like anything over a 570 would be a waster for SW '07.

So the question is, has that changed for SW '09? Is there a more-current benchmark? As it is I'm leaning towards the 1700 for no other reason than it's a little better than my 560.

Any advise would be 'preciated.

Dan

Dan's Blog
 
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Dan,

You wouldn't happen to be launching SW with a macro running, would you? Like with a modified shortcut that uses the "/m" switch? I found that I would get the exact same behavior on my system any time I used the /m switch to launch a macro along with SW. Any macro - even a blank one. VSTA or VBA.

-handleman, CSWP (The new, easy test)
 
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We assume you have 2 gigs of ram......

I wasn't able to use an intellipoint mouse / driver with 07.
It was causing all sorts of graphic problems and causing the CPU to peg 100% on simple sketches.

Are you using a Microsoft mouse?
 
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I'd sooner think the issue was with SW than the actual card. I say this because I have 4 different Nvidea cards in 4 different systems and evry one of them has graphics issues with SW 2008 and 2009.
I've also noticed a surge in graphics issue threads at teh SW discussion forum. Surely all these people can't have bad graphics cards?

Rob Rodriguez CSWP
Eastern Region SWUGN Representative SW 2007 SP 2.0
 
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I'm not running any macros at start up. I do have 2 gigs of RAM. I am using a Logitech Trac Ball as my mouse. I'm going to take the machine apart and give her a good cleaning. Haven't done it in a while. If that doesn't help I'll try the 1700. I figure I've probably spent more than $400 in my time dicking around with the problem already, so I might as well. Plus, that looks like what a lot of the other folks that ran the benchmark in CBL's post are using.

I did change my monitor to a 20" Dell a while back, but I wouldn't think that would cause the problem. Could it?

Dan

Dan's Blog
 
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CBL,

Yes for all Vista systems x32 or x64. On my Core i7 no real degradation. My Thinkpad also work fine with aero.

You have to look at it this way, for those that use their computers for SW all day long, the graphics glitches are way more annoying then a small performance hit from Windows Aero.

The developers have obivously used some aspects of Aero when writing the gpu driver or the SW code. Ron didn't say who's code was the problem for depending on Aero to make the graphics work in SW.

Cheers,

Anna Wood
SW2008 SP5.0, Windows Vista SP1
IBM ThinkPad T61p, T7800, FX570M, 4 gigs of RAM
 
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Thanks Anna,

I talked with Ron about this a couple days ago when he posted at the SW forums. I've turned Aero back on and things do seem better the little I have used my Vista system since. It may have been the solution? If so I won't need to buy and ATI card to replace the Nvidea card which I've been thinking about :)

My reason for turning Aero off as been rendering performance. When you have 200, 500, 1100 renderings to complete even small amounts of saved time add up :) At the moment my renderings are in small quantities so turning Aero on shouldn't have a huge impact.

Rob Rodriguez CSWP
Eastern Region SWUGN Representative SW 2007 SP 2.0
 
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I've got an ancient FX-500 card here that--one day--decided it was toast. So, despite what all prudent urban legends would tell you, it is indeed possible for these things to expire.

Also--as I posted at Rob's blog--I'm running an ATI card for the first time, and it's working great with three flavors of SolidWorks concurrently installed on this system. (That from a guy who's always run Quadro cards in the past.) In the last two versions of SolidWorks, something has in fact changed on nVidia's side or SolidWorks' side to create the problems everyone's seeing on the boards. Keep in mind that the good performance I'm seeing with all three flavors of SolidWorks is, of course, with a single graphics driver installed. The only glitches I see are the typical endemic SolidWorks glitches that appear on machines with uber-card-three-thousands installed.

So I wouldn't be so hesitant to go the way of ATI these days. Lots of evidence of these requiring less hassle than the old standard Quadros with the recent versions of SolidWorks.



Jeff Mowry
A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.
 
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Eltron,

I have an ATI FirePro V5700 in my computer right now that I am testing. I like it. Also have a FirePro V3750 that will see a few hours in my machine this weekend. I expect that to work just as well.

I like the ATI FirePro enough, and have been somewhat dis-satisfied with the current state of Nvidia glitches with SolidWorks, to purchase an ATI FirePro V8700. It gets installed this weekend.

One thing I noticed and like about these three ATI cards when I pulled them out of their boxes where the weight of the cards. They are hefty because all of them have big copper heatsinks under the big cooling fans.

Much more robust then the Nvidia FX570 that I have with its dinky aluminum heatsink and fan.

I think ATI is very competitive with Nvidia these days and would not hesitate at all in recommmending them for a SolidWorks workstation.

Cheers,



Anna Wood
SW2008 SP5.0, Windows Vista SP1
IBM ThinkPad T61p, T7800, FX570M, 4 gigs of RAM
 
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Mine's a V5600. And honestly, the only reason I even considered going with ATI was because of a strong recommendation by Stephan (anyone heard from him lately?). At the time I built this system over a year ago, this series of cards was so new the drivers were a bit glitchy. But they updated often, and I find no fault with the current set.

Contrast that with updating/upgrading nVidia drivers. To do it correctly, you must hunt down an obscure piece of freeware to properly uninstall the old driver, perform the long installation (hope you don't have many icons on your desktop), restart, reinstall, restart, etc. If there's something I'll never miss from using nVidia stuff, it's the driver management. No such requirements with the ATI stuff I've used.



Jeff Mowry
A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.
 
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