Graphics Systems SolidNotes

Running SolidWorks From An iPad

So I've been living with an iPad for two weeks. Has it changed how I consume, share, and even create digital content? Absolutely. But not just at home -- also in the office.

How's that possible? A little $12 app called Desktop Connect. It allows me to log into my Dell M90 remotely, using RDP protocol built into all corporate flavors of Windows from XP through 7. All I have to do is turn it on in the Control Panel of my machine, and that's it. I fire up Desktop Connect on my iPad, tap on the computer I want to log into (it automatically populates a list from the network), and log in. Instantly, I'm looking at my desktop, just as I had it before I logged in remotely. All my application windows and documents are up as running ... it's almost like I'm moving my desktop to a remote device like in Avatar. So when I walk away to a collegue's desk, go into a meeting room, or just catch someone in the hall, everything is there. Including SolidWorks.

Even though none of my PC applications (Outlook, SolidWorks, Catalyst) are meant for multitouch, the interface through Desktop Connect allows a good amount of functionality. I can pull up drawings and 3D models in SolidWorks. I can interact with them, rotate and zoom, and send them to a nearby printer, be it an HP Laserjet or a Dimension 3D printer.

I can even model a simple part from scratch, do a Simulation on it, make changes to the model, and rerun the Simulation to see the results of my change. Not that I would do an entire project like that, but again, we're talking out-of-box functionality. That's pretty awesome!

Bypass Your Graphics Card

If you have display glitches or similar issues in SolidWorks that you suspect may be due to an old driver or unsupported graphics card, there is a pretty simple way to get some good confirmation. It's a setting inside of SolidWorks iteself called "Use Software OpenGL."

Where do you find it? Tools > Options > System > Performance. You will find a setting to turn on Software OpenGL -- it's a check box. Important: You can only set this option when you are in SolidWorks but you have no documents open. Since you're changing how the graphics are being dealt with, if you have documents open in SolidWorks you can't very well make the switch and hence the option checkbox will be grayed out.

Once you set this to "on", you are telling SolidWorks not to use the graphics card for OpenGL functions -- you're essentially bypassing the card. It's not as fast to work in this mode, but if you have an old graphics card, or one that isn't supported, it might be better to work this way. If you're using this setting as part of the troubleshooting process, you'll know that your problem is graphics card or driver related and can proceed accordingly.

BTW, in case you're wondering, we currently recommend the nVidia Quadro FX580 as our baseline graphics card for SolidWorks users.

Windows 7 and SolidWorks

Just over two years ago we were talking about Windows Vista and SolidWorks 2007, and now I’m starting to look towards Windows 7 and SolidWorks 2010. Before I comment on this let me tell you what SolidWorks has to say on Windows 7.

When Microsoft Windows® 7 is released; will there be a new release of SolidWorks that will be officially supported on this platform?

At the present time, SolidWorks does not have any official information regarding the support of running SolidWorks on Windows 7.
Please refer to the SolidWorks System Requirements webpage for the currently supported operating systems:
http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/SystemRequirements.html

As we can see SolidWorks is not commenting on this release of Windows but from what I remember the same was true with Vista when it was first announced. With the start of the SolidWorks 2010 Beta program and Windows 7 as a release candidate I think we can expect to see this operating system fully supported with in the 2010 release of SolidWorks.

I am testing Windows 7 on my laptop as I write this blog, what I can tell you is SolidWorks 2009 SP3 is working and stable on my PC – so far so good. I have found a few glitches here and there and look forward to a fully supported version on Windows 7 hopefully in the near future.

Until then stay tuned for more information as I get it.

Process Explorer : A Powerful “Free” Application

Ever curious to know what processes SolidWorks is using? Need to find out if your Anti-Virus is running? Maybe you’re in search for a utility other than Task Manager? Sounds like a good time to discover the benefits of using Process Explorer.

Process Explorer provides you with a detailed visual representation of your systems' currently active processes.

 

It displays the processes' corresponding program icons, a command line fly-out, and it color-codes the processes' status.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process Explorer also comes with a powerful search tool that shows you which processes have certain handles opened or DLLs loaded. You can even use this search utility to track down viruses and malware.

 

In the end it can provide some meaningful insight on how SolidWorks, Windows, and many other applications work. Download it for free from Microsoft TechNet's Windows Sysinternals : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

Graphics Drivers for 2008 and Windows Vista

In conjunction with the release of SolidWorks 2008, Microsoft Windows Vista users can now download certified driver version 6.14.11.6250 (NVIDIA version 162.50) from the Hardware & Graphics Cards webpage (http://www.solidworks.com/pages/services/videocardtesting.html). This driver is certified for use with SolidWorks 2008 for the following NVIDIA cards:

Quadro FX 350
Quadro FX 550
Quadro FX 560
Quadro FX 1400
Quadro FX 1500
Quadro FX 3400
Quadro FX 3450
Quadro FX 3500
Quadro FX 4500
Quadro FX 4600
Quadro FX 5500
Quadro FX 5600

No certified Vista drivers are posted at this time for any ATI cards, laptop cards (vendors such as Dell, HP, etc.) or for SolidWorks 2007. More drivers will be made available for downloading as soon as they complete the SolidWorks certification process.

Display turned sideways?

Last night, a friend of mine called me at home, desperate for some computer help. His wife was working on her laptop for a report due the next morning, and their toddler got loose and natually banged on the keyboard. No physical damage was done, but the display on the laptop was rotated 90 degrees -- that is, the physical screen was fine but all of the dialog boxes and mouse movements were sideways!

I have to admit I was at a loss. It wasn't something that Windows would do, I thought -- maybe something specific on his laptop hardware. My fiance overheard my conversation and right away she knew what it was - hit the CTRL-ALT-Up Arrow. And it fixed it! I just had to ask her why...

It turns out that some graphics card drivers have "screen rotation" hotkeys. I'm guessing this was conceived for Tablet PCs, but apparently some drivers for regular desktops and laptops have this too. You might be able to go into the driver and disable the hotkeys -- see your documentation for your particular hardware. Anyway, if you run into this, it trying the key combinations listed below might save you some grief. This information might also be useful around April 1st ... :)

Ctrl-Alt-Up Arrow - right side up

Ctrl-Alt-Right Arrow - 90 degrees

Ctrl-Alt-Down Arrow - 180 degrees

Ctrl-Alt-Left Arrow - 270 degrees

Software OpenGL -- What Is It?

Software OpenGL is a SolidWorks setting that will tell SolidWorks to emulate OpenGL on it's own and not attempt to use the OpenGL support of the graphics card driver. In the "old days" this was used a lot on systems whose graphics drivers had no OpenGL support at all; Software OpenGL will automatically turn on when no OpenGL support is detected.

Most graphics cards these days will at least emulate OpenGL and therefore support the use of OpenGL calls from application software like SolidWorks, so that’s why SolidWorks did not automatically turn on the Software OpenGL option even if you're using an unsupported "consumer/game" graphics card.

Software OpenGL as a user-selectable option is useful for troubleshooting graphics card and driver problems, and in addition SolidWorks often performs better when you tell it to ignore the emulated OpenGL support on game and consumer-type graphics cards.

To set the Software OpenGL option in SolidWorks, you must open SolidWorks but have no parts, assemblies or drawings open. Then you can go to Tools > Options > Performance and toggle the option as needed. If you have a file open in SolidWorks when you try this, the option will be greyed out. Just close all data files but keep the SolidWorks program running and you will have access to the checkbox.

More Vista and SolidWorks

Well it's been a couple months form my last Vista post and I have had to opportunity to use Vista on a daily basis, let me take a moment to tell you what you can expect.

First my PC: I have a Dell M90 Laptop with 2 gigs of ram and a Quadro FX 2500M video card. Vista rates your PC on a performance scale they call the Windows Experience Index and gives it a base score. The base score currently ranges from 1 to 5.9 and the higher the better, my PC has a score of 4.8 and I notice no hardware problems while running Vista. I will tell you this, not even to consider upgrading to Vista unless you have a newer machine no more than a year old with a quality graphics card and a least 2 gigs of ram. Otherwise your Vista experience will be less then exciting, for example my home laptop runs vista and has a base score of 2.4 it has sound problems and runs slow, but the PC was never intended to run Vista and is a couple years old.

For the most part I like Vista a lot and when I switch back to my XP machine I miss it. The general feel of Vista should be familiar to you; the layouts are very similar and for the most part functions the same. It will take you a week or two to get comfortable with the new interface and to find where they moved some setting and commands. There is one thing I turned off right away -- and I mean right away! User account control or UAC, Microsoft's way of protecting you from well yourself. You will want to disable this for your user account in the user account area.

You will find a lot of nice features in the new Vista. Too many to talk about in this blog; the best thing is to jump in and try it for yourself. If you are going to run SolidWorks, just wait for 2008 to come out (2007 has a Pre-Release 2 Vista version); I wouldn't bother with 2007 at this point. I have been using 2008 Beta 4 in Vista and it works great (you're going to love the new 2008). Soon we will be able to talk about 2008 and it will be out later this summer. Until then, if you're the cutting edge type get ready to switch to Vista, so far its great and more and more programs and drivers become available every day.

Benchmark your SolidWorks hardware

Did you ever wonder how your computer hardware stacks up against other hardware when it comes to SolidWorks performance? Not sure how much better Brand X Newest Edition graphics card would be compared to what you already have? What you're looking for is a hardware benchmark.

There is no perfect benchmark, but there is at least one SolidWorks-specific benchmark test which can be run on SolidWorks 2007. It's from Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, better known as SPEC. Go to their website at www.spec.org and check it out. You can compare your numbers against some very modern machines, such as the Dell Precision 390 and 490 series workstations.

When looking at this benchmark, keep in mind the datasets being used. If you have much larger assemblies than their test assembly, then any differences in file i/o will be magnified becuase you're doing more of that operation. It's not perfect but it's better than a "gut feel".

Quad-Core is it faster?

Quad core processors are no longer the future. Earlier this year Intel released the new Core 2 Extreme Quad Core processor, with all of this quadie goodness SolidWorks is sure to fly right? Well maybe, before you rush off and ask purchasing to get you one of these bad boys for the ultra low cost of around $1500 lets take a look at how they work.

For a program to take advantage of more then one processor it has to be "multithreaded". If you're like most people this may not mean a lot to you. Basically when an application is multithreaded it can do more then one thing at a time. Most PC programs (SolidWorks included) are not multithreaded; they approach tasks in a linear fashion (1 then 2 then 3 and so on). If an application is multithreaded it can take advantage of extra processors by doing things in parallel (1 and 2 at the same time). As you can guess this will increase your performance. If you would like a more in depth explanation about multithreading take a look here, but make sure you come back.

Now that we have a basic understanding of multithreading lets see how we can take advantage of this in SolidWorks. Currently SolidWorks only has one area of its program that is multithreaded: hidden line calculations. If you have a multiprocessor system SolidWorks will spin off a new process to run the hidden line calculations (you can see this in the task manager). There are a few other areas where SolidWorks will use the other processor but this is done internally without creating a new process. These areas are in opening files, doing mass properties calculations, and multi-body operations. What does this really mean for us in "real" numbers? About a 20-30% increase in performance compared to a single processor. Currently SolidWorks will only use two processes at maximum. Therefore a dual core will have the same performance benefit as a quad core at a significant cost savings.

Quad core technology is cutting edge, it's just too soon to recommend. As software works to keep up with technology we will see a benefit to having four processors. For now all the "Quadie goodness" can wait, spend the money on a Dual core with extra RAM or a better video card.