OpenGL Hardware Acceleration for Pro/DESKTOP

Introduction

OpenGL is the proven industry standard for High Performance Graphics. Pro/DESKTOP has been built to take advantage of hardware implementations of OpenGL. With suitable OpenGL graphics hardware, you can enjoy the benefits of greater responsiveness when working with large models and assemblies. With Pro/DESKTOP 2001, you can turn on some additional productivity enhancing features, for example workplanes show as glass and smooth view animation. You will find these in the Options dialog under the Tools menu.

In order to gain the performance benefits offered by an OpenGL accelerated graphics board, you need to ensure that the configuration settings for the board match the requirements made by Pro/DESKTOP. In most cases, if not all the requirements are met, then Pro/DESKTOP will fall back to the software implementation of OpenGL and the performance will be equivalent to not having an OpenGL graphics card installed. Therefore, it is important to exercise care in choosing the display settings for the graphics card.

The Pro/DESKTOP web site provides a list of qualified OpenGL boards and driver versions which is updated regularly. We encourage you to visit this resource for up-to-date information regarding the status of graphics drivers.

If you have just bought a graphics card, you will have been given a driver, probably on a floppy disk or CDROM. Graphics card manufacturers tend to update their drivers frequently with continuing improvements and usually provide a web site from which to download the latest driver. We encourage you to update your graphics driver from the web. Since we can only qualify a limited number of boards with a corresponding limited number of driver versions, you may well be using a board or be running a driver version not on our qualified list. Use the information on this page to help you determine what settings affect Pro/DESKTOP.

If you experience problems of a graphical nature in Pro/DESKTOP, or in the extreme case, if a crash occurs when opening a new window, you can disable graphics hardware acceleration. Start Pro/DESKTOP and open the Tools/Options... dialog. Under the General tab, there is an option "Disable graphics hardware acceleration". Check the box to disable acceleration.

How to determine whether Pro/DESKTOP graphics will be accelerated

In order to help you assess whether Pro/DESKTOP will be accelerated by your graphics card in the current configuration, you can run GLtest, a small, standalone test program that simulates part of Pro/DESKTOP 2001. When you run this program it will tell you whether both Designs and Drawings will benefit from acceleration via a pop up message. While the program is running, a console window is displayed with more detailed information. You may wish to use the detailed information when troubleshooting, or when experimenting with display settings that are not mentioned on our list of qualified drivers.

Pro/DESKTOP Requirements

Pro/DESKTOP 2001 requires the following minimum requirements to enable acceleration:

Graphics performance will be improved further by the existence of an overlay plane with at least 2 color bits. In particular, an overlay plane improves pre-selection highlighting and dynamics. Some cards support an overlay plane at lower resolutions, but due to a limited memory resource, do not support one at higher resolutions. Pro/DESKTOP may run with hardware accelerated graphics at the higher resolution but there may be a trade-off with dynamics performance.

* If the graphics card does not support a stencil buffer, Design windows may still be accelerated, but the View/Section... command will be disabled. To enable the View/Section... command, it will be necessary to disable graphics hardware acceleration from the Tools/Options... dialog.

Display Settings

We have provided below a brief glossary of terms that you might encounter when dealing with a graphics card's display options and how they may affect Pro/DESKTOP. The generic display settings - color depth, resolution and monitor refresh frequency - can be set from the Display Control Panel applet which is best launched by selecting Properties on the right mouse button menu over the desktop area. Refer to your graphics card manual for more specific options relating to the hardware. You may find these presented as an additional tab in the Display Control Panel applet.