I'd rather take it nice and slow - disabling 3D acceleration in CoCreate Modeling (15 Jul 2009)

So the graphics driver for your graphics card seems to be really buggy, and you cannot get it work at all with CoCreate Modeling. What can you do?

First, check the latest driver versions provided by the graphics card vendor. If you already have the latest version, try a version which was previously certified either by PTC/CoCreate or one of the other large CAD vendors. Also, remember to switch the graphics driver into "CoCreate Modeling" mode if the driver has such an option.

If the problem persists, and the graphics card is supported by PTC, contact PTC for help. They will work with the graphics card vendor to fix the problem. If the card is unsupported, contact the graphics card vendor directly.

But if all this fails, or if you want to take a quick stab at the problem, you can also have CoCreate Modeling ask the graphics driver to turn off hardware acceleration for 3D graphics. This will often bypass the buggy parts in the graphics driver, and the problem will go away. Things will also slow down, of course, i.e. 3D viewing operations won't be as snappy as before. On most systems, however, you will still be able to work with small to medium assemblies just fine.

All you need to do to disable hardware acceleration in CoCreate modeling is set an environment variable called SDPIXELFORMAT, and give it a value of SOFTWARE. To set the environment variable, use the System Control Panel.

System control panel

Click sequence in Windows XP:

  • Start/Control Panel
  • Run System control panel
  • Select the Advanced tab
  • Click "Environment Variables".

Click sequence in Vista:

  • Start/Control Panel
  • Click System and Maintenance, then System
  • Click Advanced System Settings; this may pop up a user-access control dialog which you need to confirm
  • Click Environment Variables

Now create a new environment variable SDPIXELFORMAT and set the value to SOFTWARE.



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Revision: r1.3 - 27 Jul 2009 - 09:41 - ClausBrod
Blog > DefinePrivatePublic20090715NiceAndSlow
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