This is NOT a 'problem' per se. This is how NX was designed to operate so as to maximize the display performance as it takes advantage of the way modern graphics card, and their firmware, displays shaded models. We've provided adequate options, using both Customer Defaults and Visualization Preferences, so that users can control how and when this new display behavior is being utilized.
As for your comment about changing Customer Defaults having no effect on your existing parts, that is also how this works as the options associated with such settings as 'Facet Scale', 'Refinement Factor', 'Edge' and 'Face Tolerances', etc, these are all PART specific settings which means that they are inherited from Customer Defaults ONLY once, when the part was originally created from scratch. Any existing part, including templates, needs to be opened and these settings changed, for that specific part file, using Preferences and then resaved in order to take effect. This is the way Customer Defaults has always worked, it's not something new for NX 9.0. There have always been PART and SESSION specific settings and when it comes to things that effect how models are rendered or shaded, these are almost always PART specific since users may wish to tune the graphical behavior and trade-offs between performance and appearance of individual parts depending on their size, complexity or how they're going to be used downstream by others. This last issue, how they're going to be used, is why we are now providing separate settings for simple Shaded Display mode versus Advanced Visualization modes, so that you can set-up NX so that when you're simply working on your models you can get the best graphical performance albeit while sacrificing some visual precision, yet when you wish to display high-quality images using the advanced hardware rendering power in most of today's graphics cards, you won't need to change the facet settings to get near photo-realistic rending as there are now separate settings saved with each of your parts so as to cover both of these situations automaticially.
Note that we didn't make these changes to how models are displayed without considering what was important and how we thought our customers were going to be using NX and we've implemented ways that these can be controlled with that in mind. I think that once you realize what's happening and why, and how you're able to control these behaviors so as to take maximum advantage of what your hardware is capable of, you'll come to see that this was done to assure you maximum performance and productivity while getting the most out of the investment that was made in the hardware that you're now running NX on.
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Digital Factory
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.