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mfalk1-Visitor
1-Visitor
September 10, 2013
Question

Graphics slow on many different computers

  • September 10, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 7934 views

I have an installation of Creo 2.0 Academic Edition on about 200 workstations with a floating license server.

Whenever I first load Creo on a freshly imaged machine, the graphics are crazy slow even on simple geometry. Just mousing over a simple cube causes the computer to slowly render the wireframe for about 5 seconds and Creo completely frozen until the process completes. Once I paste graphics win32_gdi into the config.pro file, it the problem seems resolved.

We've been teaching Creo/Pro-E since Wildfire3 and have run into this same problem in every version (since WF4) with many different computers including my personal computer which is an Intel i7 machine with 6gb of ram and dual nvidia graphics cards. The computer that I'm currently teaching with is a Core2 Duo Dell with 2gb of ram and a Radeon X1300. It's a little dated but I have to imagine that it can handle the simple geometry that I'm teaching to high school students.

Attached is a screenshot taken while Creo is choking on the graphics of an imported STEP file. The exact same thing happens on parts and assemblies created in Creo.

My questions are:

What does the graphics win32_gdi line actually do?

And...

Once graphics win32_gdi is inserted into the config.pro file, is Creo taking advantage of any hardware graphics acceleration?

    1 reply

    A
    Anonymous
    September 10, 2013

    Matt,

    You should only use the win32_gdi option as a last resort. It turns off Creo's use of the graphics card and instead uses the processor. For most computers, updating the graphics driver fixes the issues you are seeing.

    This document explains the various graphics options and preferred method for using them: http://apps.ptc.com/schools/references/support_creo2_graphics.pdf.

    Regards,

    Adam

    M
    mfalk1-VisitorAuthor
    1-Visitor
    September 10, 2013

    Adam:

    • I installed the latest drivers (still about 3 years old) and then Creo wouldn't make it past the splash screen.
    • Then I edited the graphics options in config.pro as it says in that PDF (added "graphics opengl" "use_software_opengl yes" and "!graphics win32_gdi") and the original problem returned.
    • Then I commented out the "use_software_opengl yes" and it wouldn't make it past the splash screen again.
    • Finally I commented out "graphics opengl" and uncommented "graphics win32_gdi" so I suppose that I'm back where I started.

    Any other suggestions?

    A
    Anonymous
    September 10, 2013

    What type of graphics cards do you have? If you are using the internal Intel HD cards, they are not supported and unfortunately, you'll need to run using the win32_gdi graphics.

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