displaying large assemblies

[robinski]

How can I get Solidworks to display my large assembly faster?
I currently have an assembly of approximately 750 parts.
and 45 subassemblies. I have tried to change parts to featherweight in the subassemblies and have set my large assy mode in the options to 400 parts, but it still takes about 3 minutes to load, and when I rotate the assembly it takes about 30 seconds per arrow click. I am using a pentium 1.4 Gig machine with 512 ram and a 64 meg video card.
Help stuck in time.

 

[dhinners]

Three minutes to load is not bad for that size of assembly. That indicates to me that you have enough CPU horsepower. Thirty seconds per arrow click rotation is very bad. That indicates to me an underpowered video card. However, are you rotating in wireframe mode? That will slow things way down. Also, any kind of transparency in your parts will clobber performance if your card does not handle this in hardware.

It is possible to have a card with 64 Mb but not enough horsepower. As I understand it, gaming type cards focus on fill rate (i.e. coloring in the triangles) with less emphasis on calculating where the triangle are (i.e wireframe & vertices).

If you can possibly try your assembly on another machine with a more CAD oriented card such as an Nvidea quadro based or Fire GL, that would tell you if your video card is a bottleneck.

 

[JNR]

I hate to say "upgrade your PC", but that would probably help. CPU speed does not appear to be an issue. You don't say what kind of graphics card you have and what driver you are using either. Both could be issues. We also use very large assemblies with complex goemetry - another issue entirely - but our speed is good. I am running a 1.4 machine at home with XP Pro and I do not have to same problems on like size files. I'm not saying it is blinding fast, but it is not that slow. BTW: your load time is not way out of line, depending on your hardware (remember you are loading a LOT of data.)

Have you checked that:

Software Open GL is OFF. (Both in your SW Options and in your graphics driver settings). Also in the Driver settings, that the Hardware Open GL acceleration slider bar is not set to zero. (It should be set to full or the highest value that runs OK.)

Your graphics cards is appropriate for CAD work. Some work great for games but not graphics.

Your SW display performance settings are appropriate. If you are using too fine a setting it is going to be slow on large assemblies.

If your graphics shows up almost immediately and the feature tree is what is taking 3 minutes, it is probably not a big graphics issue. (Graphics/User Interface are the only multi-threaded things in SW. Has to be that way if you think about it - it's a time dependent serial solver for Parasolid feature based modelling - this is why the graphics can show up real quick compared to the feature tree. And why multiple CPU chips do not help you.)

Do you have enough system memory (and it is fast enough)?
If you are running files that large you probably need to have a Gig or more if possible. If you are running into virtual memory issues, that will kill your speed. (Check to see if the disk light is wearing its poor little heart out.) Just because the total size of your stored files is, say 500MB, does not mean that they stay that way when loaded. Plus you need room for OS, SolidWorks, etc., undo space and all manner of things.

Do you have transparency turned off? (We have not had much issue with this, but some people do - seems to depend on your hardware.)

Do you leave other applications running (like email, messaging, etc.) while you are using solidWorks?

Are you using a Gforce card with Win XP? Don't - at least with SW2003. Read the SW2003 performance thread for information on that.

I would also avoid the Fire GL2/Win XP Pro. combination. It has horrible problems particularly when connected to a network (unrelated to SolidWorks).

I know this sounds dumb, but if you are on XP, you are using Win XP Pro, not the "home edition"?

Have you defragged your disk lately? (Should not affect graphics much unless you are using virtual memory.)

That should give you a ton of stuff to check up on for now.

Good Luck.

 

[SBaugh]

Couple of points to add to JNR's reply. (I don't know how I could add anything to his post though )

1) Clean out your temp directory periodically.
2) Check to make sure your card passes

http://www.solidworks.com/swdocs/support/html/videoissues/videotest.cfm

3) If you card doesn't support OpenGL you will be able to tell right away when you open SW and go to Tools\options\system options\performance and the "Software OpenGL" is greyed out. (Note: Don't open any files to view this option)

That's all I can think of right now..

,
Scott Baugh, CSWP
3DVision Technologies

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.3dmca.com

faq731-376
When in doubt, always check the help

 

[brengine]

There a remove detail during rotation somewhere in the System Options as well.

 

[SnowCrash]

We found that periodically purging the prefetch directory seems to help. I built a batch file to do this.

Crashj 'purge/binge' Johnson

 

[SBaugh]

The location for what Ken pointed out is Tools\options\Large assembly mode\....Then under display "Remove Detail during Zoom\Pan\Rotate".

If you click the help while on that menu. SW shows what the best options are for improving performance.

Best Regards, Scott Baugh, CSWP
3DVision Technologies

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

faq731-376
When in doubt, always check the help