Ryan-M

Roy, I believe that this is a bug we identified after the public beta was released. We are looking into it for the official release.

We are aware of issues effecting a small subset of Mac hardware. Can you tell me what graphics card your Mac has? You can find this information in Preferences -> Render -> Video Card Status.

Chief is not optimized in any way for workstation cards and we don't put any additional emphasis on developing or testing for them relative to what we do for gaming cards. Generally speaking the hardware between workstation cards and gaming cards is very similar, but the drivers are optimized for very specific operations and often times explicitly for certain applications. Chief stands to gain very little, if anything, from these optimizations. The raw throughput that a gaming card is capable of is likely to be superior in the context of Chief. Both gaming cards and workstation cards implement OpenGL well. There may be differences in the expected lifetime of the GPU and the support provided by the vendor for the workstation level cards, but I have little knowledge in this area.

We have addressed several bugs related to printing live layout views for the next update. Thank you to those who have been patient and have reported issues.

Alan, We have been working to improve the quality of line weights on printed live views and expect it to be better with the next update.

We have reproduced the graphics related crash in house and believe we have it fixed. The fixed issue affects graphics cards that support a maximum OpenGL version of 3.0 or 3.1. This includes Intel HD Graphics 2000/3000 (with any driver), Intel HD Graphics 4000 (with outdated drivers), as well as a variety of older ATI/NVIDIA cards.

I would guess that you have an extremely high density pattern somewhere, in which case your GPU is not actually the bottleneck. Is taking a standard overview significantly faster? It's very unlikely that upgrading your GPU would improve performance here.

You shouldn't use hardware edge smoothing and software edge smoothing at the same time. Software edge smoothing is capable of achieving better results than hardware edge smoothing but will dramatically decrease performance as it basically involves rendering each frame several times (between 2 and 15 times, depending on the level the preference is at). You can therefore expect performance to drop by a factor of roughly between 2 and 15 (again depending on the preference). Unless you're using a very low end GPU that either doesn't support mid range MSAA or supports it but suffers dramatic performance loss I would recommend using only hardware edge smoothing for previews and bumping up software edge smoothing for final views.

We have thus far been unable to reproduce the problem. One hypothesis is that something about the way your UI is configured (toolbars, dockable windows, etc) is causing the flicker. A screenshot of your Chief window would help us replicate that configuration and potentially reproduce the problem.

Hi kvelde, In X6 Save as Thumbnail no longer generates a separate image file. Instead it embeds an image in the plan which is used to display file previews in Windows Explorer and file dialogs. If you want to generate images for use in a screensaver you might try using Export Picture (File -> Export -> Export Picture). Hope this helps.