Video cards

[Rob_N]

I recently got a new workstation.
My old PC had a ATI 1650 512mb gaming class card in it after my FireGL E1 failed about 3 years ago... The gaming card was actually an improvement. Once a customer sent me the entire rear half of a vehicle including wiring and HVAC; when I only needed the liftgate sheetmetal, the gameing class card handled that just fine, where as another workstation with a Firegl T2 didn't

Now I do basic tooling and such, nothing very graphics intensive.

My new workstation has a Quadro FX 1800 and holes look exactly the way they did with the gaming card, which in today's market is a sub $50 component, where as the FX1800 was around $400.

Is there some settings to make the holes not so jagged looking or should I just return the $400 card and buy a cheaper one?

win7 Pro 64/ NX6

 

[JohnRBaker]

I assume that you're talking about how your model looks when in a shaded mode, correct?

Since all shading is based on tessellating the model, you're going to have some level of 'polygonal' shapes around holes and such. Note that if you notice this more as you zoom in, what can help it to update your display, but NOT a full Regen, just an update, which can be accessed at...

View -> Layout -> Update Display

Note that I use this so often I've both added to the View Display pop-up dialog and to make it even easier I;ve added an Icon to my View toolbar which will trigger a display update.

Now as to the overall control of this, you can change the tolerance used to tessellate your model by going to...

Preferences -> Visualization -> Faceting

...and in Part Settings section of the dialog, you can change the Shaded View Tolerance to one of the finer (tighter) levels (the default is 'Standard' but there are 3 finer settings below that plus even a user defined Customize). However, be warned, using a finer display tolerance will slow down the performance of the system since there will be more facets to shade and so display dynamics my suffer, but the image will look better. Also, this setting only effect the current part file, but it will be saved with the part so that next time you open it it will have retained this setting. This allows you to only change the tolerance on those models where this might be more critical than others.

Anyway, give it a try and see if this helps.

BTW, there are other reasons why one should stick to certified graphics cards.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[Rob_N]

Thanks, Update display worked great.I was using regenerate work, which didn't so anything.

GM tends to use Hex quite a bit for holes, so when you're just looking at them on the screen it is hard to tell what is what, visually, They show up properly in drafting but when you just need a quick count of how many circular holes, slots and hexes


BTW, did you get that email I sent about the craiglist ad? I only had a UGS email addy for you.

What reasons are there to use certified cards? Doesn't the whole system have to be certified to gain tech support? My system was built by Rave

 

[JohnRBaker]

Concerning your email, yes I got it and the appropriate people in our organization have already taken action. Thank you and if you ever run across anything similar in the future, please don't hesitate to bring it to our attention ASAP.

As for the issue of certified hardware, while in most cases non-certified hardware, as long as it's from a reputiable vendor and it was designed to support the generally accepted standards, there shouldn't be a problem. However, if you are running a non-certified configuration and you DO encounter problems it may be difficult for our people to verify and correct the problem since we only have access to certified configurations. In those situations we may still try and help you, but often if we can't track it down, you'll be at the mercy of the support people from your hardware vendor who will probably no be familiar with our software. The biggest issue that we have is with graphics cards developed for gamers. Years ago, these boards were virtually identical to the so-called professional devices just that they were marketed to a different audience with a much lower price and it was during that era that people discovered that they could use these cheaper boards and at worse, have to change 'jumper' or something to make them fully operational and so a sort of 'urban legend' was born that there was no real difference. However, as the gamer industry grew and the game developers started to demand specific capabilities, often outside the realm of CAD, now that there was a big demand they could start to create specific configurations which ONLY provided what the gamers needed and they could leave out stuff like Open GL support and other things, and that's when it became a problem. At least the CAD side of the user industry became a victim of the success of the gamer side since the vendors no longer had to create single product and just tweak it a bit and then package and market it to two different groups. They could now create devices which were optimized for ONE or the OTHER, but not both.

As for issue about the while system or just the graphics card, if you use a certified graphics card you can at least download a certified driver from us that you know will work with NX, even if the workstation itself was not on our 'list'.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[Toost]

My tip is to use certified computers, or at least the "certified" graphics cards. I support a number of companies running NX.
I have seen so many strange problems on non certified computers, so much time spent on trying to solve problems due to the computer configuration. And as John says, they will try help, but if they cannot reproduce the problem, -have a nice day. A recent problem i have on a non certified computer is that the component preview window "exits the NX session", and there is no help to get because the preview window do not exit the session on the certified computers....
Regards,
Tomas