Chief_QA

For his raytrace issue it could be this problem:

 

 

The missing DLL was provided in a windows update KB2999226 which may not have been installed on your system or maybe failed to install.  If you run the Visual C++ Redistributable for 2015 found on the Microsoft website it should resolve your problem. 

 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48145

 

There is a plethora of information available in this thread that I wished I had located years earlier.  In particular, how various hardware configurations can effect rendering and ray-tracing times in Chief, along with the the importance of a thorough understanding of light sources and their individual impact upon ray tracing.  Somewhere in this thread one of the participants states the value this information has to potential Chief clients and that cannot be understated.  The lack of concrete technical documentation that discusses various processors (i.e. I7-XXX vs Xeons), video cards (i.e. Nvidia GeForce 980m vs Quadro M4000) and how they directly relate to performance within various aspects of Chief Architect was ultimately the deciding factor for me to pursue Revit.  Despite it being more expensive and more complicated, I was able to source the afore mentioned information much more easily. 

 

It is important to know some of the geeky details, such as:

 

-Is a blazing fast processor more important than a top of the line video card?

-Does the amount of memory on the video card directly effect performance in Chief?  

-Does a SSD hard drive vs a mechanical one make a difference if we don't have a ginormous amount of RAM to begin with?

-How many CPU cores/threads can Chief effectively use, and when and where do we benefit from 24 cores vs, say, 8?   (this is the Xeon vs I7 debacle)

-At what point does added RAM no longer truly make a difference in Chief?

-At what point does the bottleneck of the system switch from CPU to GPU and vice versa?

 

 

When someone is building a machine for a very specific purpose it is of upmost importance to them to allocate their funds properly.  I have a feeling many other people like me have found precious little information on the specifics of just how Chief Architect software interacts and utilizes hardware.  It may not be the sexiest of information, but for many (including me) the lack thereof drove me to Revit.

 

Do you have a link for this data?  I went to their website and I didn't find anything like you mentioned at all.  I wouldn't consider "most affordable processor" defining any performance criteria like you mentioned.  All I saw was some old outdated information involving a few laptops and a couple of HP desktop computers.  Nothing covering Windows 10 at all, in fact some of the listings didn't even have Windows 8.1, only Windows 8.  I especially like their Mac solution which is just run Bootcamp, no native solution at all.  Running a directX software based system on a platform designed for OpenGL would not be something I would ever want to do.

 

Do you know if they perform any OS certification testing like we do?  We are Windows certified for Windows 10 and have been doing this since their certification testing became available.  Our products are also used at Microsoft for their own OS update testing.

 

I would really like to see this data and how we could improve our system by just recommending a few high end systems or cards and eliminate the freedom of our users to "run what they brung"

Yes it is, you need to request it from our website in the normal fashion, there should be a choice to request either X7 or X8 now.

In X6 it would be better to bring in as a PDF, in X7 we improved the bringing in tabbed formatted text from outside of Chief and you could do live text in X7.

Which version of chief?  X6?

I have now resorted to using the inbuilt printer driver and put up with the larger file sizes as I have had so many problems with any other printer driver.

I cannot print the entire page if I have an embedded pdf on the page, some part of the page will print blank usually the bottom half of the sheet but sometimes other areas.

Was pointed out in beta by the way.

This should have been fixed in the 17.1.2.2 update, if you are still seeing this issue please send in a plan to tech support so we can investigate this issue.

Thank you, we have your report.  We will be entering a critical bug on this and maybe our developers can fix the issue.  However, I have the identical video card you have and am still not able to repro this crash.  Your driver is a bit old, it is from 7/2/14 9.18.13.4052.  My driver is 2/5/15 9/18/13.4752.  This could be part of it, you should check your other systems as well and see if they are also out of date and update.  X7 uses some of the latest OpenGL commands and it is imperative to have the latest drivers to fully benefit from these newer OpenGL commands for system performance and stability.  We still shouldn't crash, that is bad, and we will see if we can fix this.

Just downloaded the 64 bit version to the same system that I rand the 32 bit.

Seems to be smoother, but was still able to generate this crash.

..\source\ChiefQtApplication.cpp(174): Error #272000999

" Assertion failed: An unexpected error occurred. You should use "Save As" to save your current work in a NEW FILE and restart this program."

4/27/2015 5:52:19 PM

Build: 17.1.2.2x64

Graham

Did you send the report in? I am not able to reproduce the crash, I tried on 2 systems, with multiple 3D views, plan view, 1 raytrace going, 1 raytrace queued, generating 3D views, flipping through the library, CPUs maxed, fans screaming away and nothing. If you send the report in we can look at the action report and maybe better able to determine what is going on. When you get the assertion failure, there should be a send report button, just press it and we will have an action report. How easy is that?