Doug_Park

Quadro and FireGL cards are often based on the same technology as their gaming counterparts with some tweaks to support certain CAD tasks for certain old school CAD programs. Generally speaking they are fine cards to run Chief on. But they don't offer a gain in performance proportional to their additional price. The link that Kirk posted earlier is a set of independent benchmarks that measure the performance of video cards. While the benchmarks aren't measuring Chief performance and they don't represent an exact comparison to the performance one would see in Chief, they are a good indication of the relative performance of those cards with Chief. We work hard to make NVIDIA, ATI and Intel graphics work. There are cases where each of these vendors has released hardware/driver combinations that have issues. If you have issues with any particular hardware let us know. Often the answer is to get a newer driver, but sometimes we need to work around a driver deficiency. The Troubleshooting section in Preferences>Render represents the specific tweaks that most often are helpful in dealing with those issues.

Go to the NVIDIA Control Panel>Manage 3D Settings and then select which video card you want to use. You can set things up on a per application or global basis.

I'm not at all clear on what you are trying to do. Perhaps you could get a plan/layout set to our support team that demonstrates the problem so that we can diagnose what is going on.

The slowness is in a third party application that we use. It is my understanding that it is in the process of being fixed. Aside from the obvious security risk of running as administrator, some features of the OS don't work, such as drag and drop of files from explorer. I'm not sure what else might not work. It is never a good idea to run any program as Administrator for extended periods of time.

Normally one should not run Chief as Administrator as that will cause some things to not work as expected. I played with your plan and found that everything I did was snappy. Less than a second to join roof planes etc. Even did some roof editing in 3D and is was quit quick. Not sure why your system would be that slow unless there is something else running on the system that is hogging resources. Possibly it is your malware scanning.

1) Get as many cores in the CPU(s) as you can afford, faster is better. 2) Get the fastest video card you can afford. 3) Get the fastest memory that the system can support. 4) Get a fast hard drive. SSDs are a good option. 5) Get a decent amount of memory. 8GB is probably good, more isn't all that expensive. I also recommend taking the smart economic choice of buying new hardware every 2 years. Set yourself a budget, say $1000 a year and buy a $2000 computer every 2 years. This will keep you ahead of the curve on average since a $4000 computer today is probably going to be outperformed by a $2000 computer in 2 years. You can change the numbers and frequency to your liking but generally speaking systems at $1000 with reasonable component picks are decent for Chief. Spending twice as much won't get you twice the performance.

Saving to network shares has certain inherent risk, including some known Windows problems that may or may not be in play here. The fact that you are getting archives indicates that things are not failing consistently since those are being copied from the server to the local drive. Failures should provide an error message, which is concerning to me. I would recommend a strategy of working locally and then backing up to the server location. In your case this would seem to make the most sense. I am still worried that there is a problem in Chief so if you are willing to work with our support team to help diagnose the issue that would be appreciated.

I don't know why a dentil molding would make the ray tracer that slow. Number of surfaces for ray trace should normally be a much lower impact on time than number of lights or number of pixels. It would be good to send your slow example to support so that we can have a chance to look into the cause as that doesn't sound like something that I would expect.

The logic that "all other programs work fine" so it must be a problem with Chief and not a problem with the machine is flawed. The number of times we have heard this and subsequently found a problem with the machine that was causing the problem is countless. It isn't always the case, but ruling out the machine as the problem is a critical first step. In the rare case that a customer doesn't work with us in good faith to do these checks it becomes very difficult to diagnose the problem when it is a machine issue. I know how frustrating it is to work through the diagnostic steps to prove that it isn't the machine, but it is sometime necessary. Especially in cases where the described problem is not a common issue. There are many possible explanations for a machine specific problem to appear to correlate with an update to Chief even though the problem is not in Chief. An obvious one is running low on disk space. Installing a new application on a system with already tight disk space can put a system over the edge. There are many more scenarios, and I understand that no one wants to hear the news that it is their system. But if it is the problem, then it is what needs to be fixed. We will continue to work with you for as long as it takes to diagnose the issue. If it is Chief then we need to know that so that we can correct the problem.

When saving to a sever the archive file is copied from the server to the archive folder then the new file is saved to the temporary folder after which it is moved to the server. The reason we save locally and then copy is that writing directly to a server on Windows is a lot slower than saving locally and then copying the file. Generally saving directly to a networked location can be risky because of the many more things that can go wrong with the save. Did you get any error messages when you saved? If the save or the copy to server fails you should get an error message.

If you select the printer you are ultimately going to print to in your sheet setup you should see blue lines indicating the printable area. Some large format printers have margins in excess of 1/2", especially some of the older printers. Set up your margins so that they are inside the blue lines.

Are you saving to a network location or an ejectable drive? The reason I ask is I talked to someone yesterday about an issue like this that was saving to a networked location. Also, are you working with multiple people that have access to the file in question? Are you getting archives of the files? Please call our support team, we want to get to the bottom of this. Whether it is a bug in Chief or some other cause, such as malware, we need to figure out the cause.

If you locked up navigating in the file open dialog, it is almost certainly something wrong with your system. The dialog is almost entirely controlled by the OS. We have seen cases where it responds very slowly, but that is probably also a problem with your OS or network. This points to the network responding very slowly, a disk problem, malware, or some other more obscure OS issue. Check your drive for errors, check for malware, have your IT guy check out your network. If nothing else unplug your network cables and plug them back in. That can help if the cable isn't well seated. You may also have a bad cable somewhere that has a spotty connection. If multiple people on your network are experiencing similar problems then start by replacing the cable between your server(s) and your router. If only one person is having a problem then replace their cable. I've had many commercially made cables fail over the years. Another possibility is your router. I have had routers fail as well. Power outages often precipitate failures of network hardware. I had one awhile back that took out both my DSL modem and wireless router in a way that made them fail only occasionally at first and then more persistently until I finally diagnosed the problem and replaced the hardware. Even then the router I replaced failed and I had to get the vendor to replace it. If it is a network issue you should be able to run disconnected from the network for awhile. If the problem persists then there is a problem that isn't a network problem. Also be aware that you may have multiple issues so fixing one problem may help but not fix all your issues.

Crashes in 3D are almost always due to video driver problems. If your signature indication of using an ATI card is correct then it is possibly a driver problem. ATI did have some serious compatibility issues with Windows 8.1 when it was first released. I'm not sure if their drivers are working right yet on 8.1. However, we did find that unchecking "Optimizations On" in the Render>Troubleshooting section of preferences seemed to work, although that probably makes 3D views a lot slower. I would first go directly to ATI's web site and see if they have a newer driver than what you are currently using. You will not get recent drivers from Windows update.

Assuming your intent is to get a good preview of how things will look when you print, Print Preview is actually a better option than just turning on line weights and since it is remembered on a per view basis it seems like a better option than trying to turn on line weights on a per view basis which could become annoying if you want them on or off for all views. However, be aware that print preview may be slower, especially when rendering PDFs and images as it goes for quality instead of speed.

It's not new, it is just more noticeable because of the ability to have a layout open in another view. Having line weights on/off has always been an application wide preference. The layout view is probably also updating when the change is made, which may not of happened in X5. I can see how having line weights on/off on a per view basis may be useful, although I'm pretty sure some would find having to do this on each view annoying.

If you resize the main window does it correct? The reason I ask is that we had some other odd bugs that occurred early on that fixed themselves when the main window resized and I'm wondering if this is another case. Chances are there was something you did that correlates with precipitating the problem. Try to remember what the last thing was that you did. If we can reproduce the cause that would make it a lot easier to fix.

The scale shows what the "current" scale is. This is so that when you print it is correct. If you print to a smaller sheet etc. the scale will be correct for how things were printed. Box scale has a bug in it where this isn't done so will always show the scale that it was sent to layout at rather than the actual scale.

I tried doing multiple DWG exports of the floor plan you posted using the latest update. I had no issues. My sense is that there is something about your network or systems that is precipitating the problems. Whether it is a Chief problem or not is the question. Keep working with our support team to try to figure out the problem. Did you do the basic diagnostic work on your systems? Malware could infect all of your networked systems and could explain random crashes.

I don't either, but I had significant push back from several sources that prompted me to make this a preference.

That addresses one of your requests from beta to not use bumping or pushing when you use tab/enter or type in dimensions. Unchecking it puts things back to the way they were in X5 where moving things using dimension or tab/enter would also push or bump. This does mean you can push cabinets into walls, but so far no one has complained about the change in behavior so I think we got the out of box setting right.

Are you running the 32 bit or 64 version of Chief? I'm not aware of any known crashes exporting to DWG. It is possible that there is a problem there. If you can get the plan that crashed doing the export to our support team we might be able to reproduce the problem internally. Running out of memory, especially if you are running the 32 bit version, would be a likely source of crashes.

I'm not positive about printer drivers, but I think the Win 7 printer drivers are compatible with Windows 8. But it would be worth testing that out to verify if it is a concern.

The handle sizes are settable in preferences. The handle doesn't change size when you zoom. If the issue is that you are having trouble seeing it then changing the colors would probably be the better solution.

I assume you are running with your system set to a higher DPI. For some systems, such as those that are in excess of 200 DPI the icons were so small that they were nearly unusable. We are now correctly scaling these up, although our graphics for the icons are not high resolution so they will look blurry. You can turn this off by unchecking the "Scale Toolbar Icons for High DPI" in Preferences>Appearance. After you do this your icons will be smaller.