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mpearson1-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 19, 2015
Question

screen display problems on 28" 4k screen. line colors barely visible - slow moving

  • February 19, 2015
  • 13 replies
  • 6977 views

I am using Creo 3 with a Nvidia Quadro K2000 card driving 2 off 28" 4k screens . The resoloution is 3840x2160

I can increase text sizes in Windows to make normal screen use feasible with normal human eyesight!! By increasing text to 200% it is legible and much like a normal non 4k screen but clearer.

When I open Creo 3 it looks lovely, The fonts are scaled up in accordance with windows. And then you try using it. You realise the the lines are so thin that it is hard to discern their colours and pre selection is hopeless as no difference can be de3tected.

The 'expand' triangles on the model tree and the sweet spot of the dimension numbers are so small that it takes 4 click for it to work. The hit radius is minute. These items have not scaled with the rest so selection is a nightmare and very slow.

And in addition I am struggling to get the model (1Mb) to rotate fast enough with a K2000 card. I have a very fast PC and 32Gb RAM. I tried changing things like display quality and anti aliasing but it causes it to go so slow the card crashes windows by exceeding windows time out limit of 2 seconds. So Creo crashes.

Anyone else using a 4k card and 28" screens? Anyone any ideas?

Mike


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13 replies

Inoram14-Alexandrite
14-Alexandrite
February 20, 2015

What happens at 1920x1080 res? And yeah I'm not sure a K2000 is going to push 2 monitors at 3840x2160 well. Maybe someone else is doing it can respond.

TomU23-Emerald IV
23-Emerald IV
February 20, 2015

If I'm reading NVidia's spec correctly, it looks like it should be able to drive 4 monitors simultaneously at that resolution (via Display Port).

K2000.PNG

mpearson1-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
February 21, 2015

Whilst reading the Nvidia spec is interesting it reveals little beyond the fact that, yes, its possible to run 4 monitors via display port. When you actually load a CREO3 model and try and view and manipulate it the story is, for me, somewhat different. It runs slow, such that using a 3dConnexion spacepilot is pointless as the model lags so much. Touching the display settings under Options was for me a mistake as it is now poorer that before and I cant get back to the original settings. Any sort of lag is immediately noticeable with a spacepilot.

I am not in any way certain this is a Creo or nVidia problem. of course it may be a hardware issue. But I have the latest nVidia driver, 32Gb Ram a 4 core Xeon processor that is currently 4800 on the cpu passmark charts in a Dell T5400 with Windows 7 Ultimate fully up to date.

I assume others are, or soon will be using a similar hardware configuration and its important users know what limitations they might face.

dschenken1-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 21, 2015

This problem will probably require a lot of development effort to deal with. I believe that the graphics subsystem is generally set to use 1 pixel width lines, so as the pixels get smaller, the lines they are made of become less visible. Maybe the solution can come from the card maker as a custom control for stroked lines.

Adobe dealt with a similar problem. In PDFs lines are given widths, but when zoomed out, those widths can be smaller than 1 pixel. In grayscale displays Adobe would use aliasing to approximate the lines by changing the pixel color to represent the proportion of line; if a black line would cover 1/2 the pixel, the pixel would be 50% gray. However, if the lines were thin enough they would essentially vanish, so Adobe added a setting to round up to the nearest pixel width, so even very thin lines would be 1 pixel wide, and thus generally more legible.

The PTC problem is their lines don't typically have a real width associated with them, and even if they did, they will eventually run into the same problem Adobe when 1 pixel is too small.

The best answer is for Microsoft to use SVG for it's interface elements and build in scaling to the screen size so that icon sizes are invariant without having to build them as bitmaps at different sizes. PTC could make their own subsystem as well, but as I started with - it will take a lot of development.

    mpearson1-VisitorAuthor
    1-Visitor
    February 21, 2015

    David you have explained the issue that I feared. If this is the case then we have a situation where a technology advance in monitors and graphics cards is being supported and promoted by PTC when the combination may be unusable for some in practice. I sincerely hope this is not the case. If it is then I seem a fool for being an early adopter. Yet I did my research as best I can going through all the documentation from PTC and nVidia and looking for any recommendations between the nVidia and ATI cards. The only issue there that still concerns me is that the latest Nvidia approved graphics driver remains for Croe2 not Creo3.

    Surely PTC have tested this hardware combination or similar and can comment? If they have then their advice as to how to optimise the use of 4k screens is valuable to users. Can they help? This seems possibly something the average reseller supporting users may not have come across yet.

    dschenken1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    February 22, 2015

    Just noticed "the sweet spot of the dimension numbers" I don't know if it will help, but try the config option:

    pick_aperture_radius

    Specifies the size of the area about the mouse when making selections. Units are 1/1000 of screen size.

    Default 7

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