×
INTELLIGENT WORK FORUMS
FOR ENGINEERING PROFESSIONALS

Log In

Come Join Us!

Are you an
Engineering professional?
Join Eng-Tips Forums!
  • Talk With Other Members
  • Be Notified Of Responses
    To Your Posts
  • Keyword Search
  • One-Click Access To Your
    Favorite Forums
  • Automated Signatures
    On Your Posts
  • Best Of All, It's Free!
  • Students Click Here

*Eng-Tips's functionality depends on members receiving e-mail. By joining you are opting in to receive e-mail.

Posting Guidelines

Promoting, selling, recruiting, coursework and thesis posting is forbidden.

Students Click Here

Jobs

FireGL V8650: Fluid 3D, but work in drawings is very sluggish

FireGL V8650: Fluid 3D, but work in drawings is very sluggish

FireGL V8650: Fluid 3D, but work in drawings is very sluggish

(OP)
I recently got a PC upgrade to an i7-960 CPU, 8GB RAM, Win7 64-bit, and an ATI FireGL V8650 2GB PCIe videocard.
And I'm running Wildfire 4.0 M010, 32-bit.

The 3d performance is fine; it can manipulate assemblies pretty smoothly, so it seems like the 32-bit Pro-E is working ok with the 64-bit OS in that respect.

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 a few dimensions on it can take 6-10 seconds to completely 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 nVidia 9800GT 1GB card in the previous system (WinXP 32-bit), and it was a fair bit quicker in drawings, though there was still a little lag when moving drawing views around. That card was not reused in the new system, as its RAM was starting to fail.

Before that, I was on an old Quadro FX 128MB card. Its 3d performance was terribly slow, but it was liquid-smooth in drawings.


Is there something that can be done to speed up this FireGL card's drawing performance? Some setting I'm missing?

Thank you.
 

RE: FireGL V8650: Fluid 3D, but work in drawings is very sluggish

(OP)
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.  

RE: FireGL V8650: Fluid 3D, but work in drawings is very sluggish

(OP)
Fixed: 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 has to recalculate and redraw the *entire* window when so much as a single pixel changes.

Red Flag This Post

Please let us know here why this post is inappropriate. Reasons such as off-topic, duplicates, flames, illegal, vulgar, or students posting their homework.

Red Flag Submitted

Thank you for helping keep Eng-Tips Forums free from inappropriate posts.
The Eng-Tips staff will check this out and take appropriate action.

Reply To This Thread

Posting in the Eng-Tips forums is a member-only feature.

Click Here to join Eng-Tips and talk with other members!


Resources