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

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sp8472

Mechanical
Oct 12, 2010
29
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.
 
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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.
 
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.
 
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