Doug_Park

More or less, but I have observed that in some cases SSD drives won't automatically defrag.

It looks like the line generation accounts for part of the overhead of opening a 3D view. I don't know why saving is so much slower. It isn't something that seems normal. You might try defragmentting your disk.

I got to talking to one of our engineers about this and he mentioned that we changed when we generate pattern lines. In the past we generated pattern lines only when we needed them and for everything every time they were needed. This was changed so that they are always generated and then kept up to date when objects change. If I understand how this is working then you should observe the following: 1) Opening a vector view should be more or less the same as it was in X6, possibly a bit faster. 2) Switching the rendering technique from standard to vector in an open view should be faster in X7 than X6. Plans with relatively few patterns or simple patterns will likely not show much degredation in peroformance. If you typically open and close 3D views frequently you would tend to take a bigger hit in X7 than if you typically leave 3D views open while you work. There is the possibility of us make some changes in X7 to make this better. We will look into this. If you could look into comparing the performance of opening 3D vector views between X6 and X7 that may tell us whether the pattern line generation is the culprit. I would suggest doing a 3D full overview as a test. If X6 and X7 are more or less the same or if X7 is faster that would be a strong indicator that pattern lines are the culprit.

The slowness doesn't make sense to me. So it appears that probably the render settings aren't the issue unless there is something else is going on. In the interest of eliminating the obvious: I assume you have Optimize for Multi-Core CPUs turned on. I assume you are running the 64 bit version. Are your undo files going to your SSD? Less obvious might be the CPU. But the only thing that I could imagine that might be a problem is if you are running an AMD. Although I don't have any reason to expect that it would be significantly slower in X7, the compiler we use did change so it is possible that the code is optimized better for Intel. I think we already talked about this, but it is possible that the configuration of malware scanning is turned on for files generated in X7 and off for X6. My gut tells me that there is some configuration difference between the two programs. Either in Preferences, some add on software on your system, or possibly where the program is installed.

I looked at the information you sent in as well and was not able to observe the same slowness that you documented on my laptop using either the Intel or the NVIDIA graphics. The 780 is a modern card that should not exhibit slowness due to the more modern techniques we are using. In fact it should be faster using those techniques. I'm still wondering if you have something like reflections turned on in X7 and off in X6 or something else like that. Verify the following settings between X6 and X7. If any of these are different you will likely have performance differences. These are all found in Preferences>Render 1) Set hardware Edge smoothing to 2x MSAA or None. 2) Ensure Reflections in Mirrors is off. 3) Ensure that Softare Edge Smoothing is set to 0 for previews. 4) Ensure that Command Flushing is set to Never. Items 2, 3 and 4 are likely culprits on an NVIDIA card while 1, 2, and 3 are likely culprits on ATI/AMD cards. All are likely culprits on HDGraphics. Item 4 could result in crashes or wierd artifacts on some older cards or drivers.

The image doesn't look like classic z-fighting. This might be a video card driver problem. If you haven't already done so, upgrade the driver on your video card to the latest version. What version of Chief are you running and what video card?

No automatic backups are made until you first save. It might be nice if we did that, but the assumption is that if you didn't save you were doing some sort of scratch work that you don't want to take up space on your computer. Sorry about that.

It looks like he has played with the individual text size settings in the Display control panel. What OS is he running? These settings differ depending on the OS. In general on Windows you will want to only set the size of all items rather than scaling the text sizes of individual things.

The Quadro 410 is overpriced and slow. Look here. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Quadro+410&id=2291 Quadro is a branding that has been associated with high performance CAD specific video cards. Generally they have the characteristic of being more expensive compared to gaming cards with similar and often better performance. Go here and scroll down the list. Looking for Quadro cards. Find one. Go over to the price and move up the list and you will generally find a faster card for a lot less money. Currently the list shows a Quadro K6000 for $4100, but the best performer is a GeForce GTX 980 for $420. I don't have anything against Quadro cards. They are designed for certain types of applicaions. Chief doesn't take advantage of any of the expensive features on these cards that would give them an advantage over a gaming card. One of the beliefs is that these cards have better "certified" drivers. But in our experience we have seen as many severe driver problems on Quadro cards as gaming cards. Plus the drivers on gaming cards tend to get fixed faster than the drivers on Quadro cards. Probably because there are so many more of them on the market that the issues get reported more often on gaming cards. We like to take advantage of the lower cost gaming cards because internally the Quadro vs. GeForce cards are using more or less the same hardware. There is the possibility that there is a lower mean time between failures on Quadro cards, but at 1/10th price you can keep a couple of spares around and still save money. It is unclear to me what you get for your money with a Quadro.

If you have a plan that crashes reproducibly, or even randomly but frequently, it is very useful for us to have. If we can get it to crash in house we can more than likely fix the problem. If you have something like that getting it to our support team is the shortest road to a fix. Don't assume that your crash has been reported. Often crashes are very specific to how you work or the design you have. Thanks for your feedback.

No worries. Communication without misinterpretation is hard. I get myself into trouble frequently by using words that result in ambiguous meanings.

Not normal, but I don't know how complex the plan is that you are creating. Computer slowness has many causes.

I know that some of you will probably disagree with me, but I have to say this. I liked our old icons. I like the new icons more. Both designs are in my opinion exceptionally good.

Graham, I think my confusion is your use of the term rendering. Generally rendering is used to describe the process of taking a 3D model and producing a 2D representation of that on the computer screen. We use the word model or modeling to describe the items that you are talking about. We use rendering or rendering technique to describe different ways of producing the 2D represenstaion of the 3D model. If I substitue modeling where you use rendering then what you say makes sense to me. Sorry for the confusion. Terminology is always tough.

If you are going to jump from 9.5 to X6 I would suggest going all the way to X7 as it is generally very stable and since you are already effecively learning a new application you might as well learn the latest. Chief software quality has improved a lot since 9.5. I think the first X7 Beta was probably less buggy than the released version of 9.5 that you were using. I have high confidence that the public beta was. Do what you are comfortable with. Taking a more cautious approach is reasonable. The good news is that the jump from X6 to X7 won't be nearly as big of a learning curve.

I'm trying to understand what you are asking for here. The one thing I see is the need for a way for any object to cut out a hole for it to be placed into. Pushing a cabinet into a wall. As I see it there are several desired outcomes from this. 1) The cabient is intended to be used as a shelf/niche/medicine cabinet that doesn't go all the way throught the wall. In this case there are questions to ask such as how is the opening going to be framed and trimmed. 2) Another case is if the cabinet goes all the way through. Which we can more or less do today using openings. These aren't really rendering algorithm decisions so much as how is the model going to be built decisions. One problem that occurs with the rendering algorithms is when surfaces are forced to intersect each other our algorithm won't compute lines for the intersection correctly in all cases. Which means possibly some fixup work in layout. This is done primarily because the computation is very costly to do 100% correctly and it is also felt that because in real life we don't have the luxury of having two objects occupy the same space at the same time it is viewed as a model deficiency. I'm not sure I'm helping here. Just trying to better understand what you are getting at. Thanks.

The HD2000 graphics is really old and really slow. While we may be able to get it to work, I would suggest considering something a lot more modern. Older hardware like that will almost certainly become obsolete in a few years. It is certainly not the best fit for Chief.

Chief bases the hash on the full pathname so renaming the archive would orphan it as far as Chief is concerned. I don't know why the files won't backup. That seems to be a flaw with the backup software. I've never heard of backup software failing because of file name length limits. The only thing I can imagine is that the backup is trying to recreate the full directory tree in a subdirectory on the destination drive. In theory the backup software could support long 32000 character path names, but that would make it impossible for Windows Explorer to access them directly without restoring them to their original locations.

Chief isn't creating archive folders with names too long for the filesystem on the OS. So doing a backup should always work, unless the backup software or drop box is not able to support standard length filenames. It is possible that the path to your drop box makes the name longer. Maybe you can arrange to have it be a little shorter. From your description I'm not sure what is going on but it doesn't sound like the flaw in the process is that the path name is too long, but that it is too long for where it is getting copied to. Shortening our hash might allow your setup to work, but it would fail again if you created names that pushed the length limits of the file system. I do agree that we should come up with a shorter unique identifier. But I don't think it will prevent the problem you are having for all cases.

When you select a dimension line you will get a square handle on the dimension line. Next to it there will be a diamond shaped handle. Drag the diamond shaped handle to be over the object you want to dimension. Once you are close enough to a dimensionable location on that object you should get an extension locating that object.

OK, so to show how easy it is to mess up performance benchmarks. It turns out I was comparing X6 running my NVIDIA card against X7 running the Intel HD4600 graphics. After setting things up correctly, X7 is definitely slightly faster in all the cases I talked about in my previous post. The comparison I did is surprisingly good for the HD4600 though.

We have had poblems with new iMac hardware in the past. It is something we can normally work around. The 755M is a mobile chip, probably to keep the heat requirements down as the iMac is not very good at cooling, so is probably not the best performer. But you should not normally be seeing crashes with it. This sounds like something we would need to try to reproduce. It is theoretically possible that it is faulty hardware. It wouldn't be the first time we have seen video cards fail. But it may also be a faulty driver, which is a lot harder to update on a Mac. I assume you are running Yosemite with the latest OS updates. This sounds like hardware that we should try to investigate. The first thing I would reccomend is to go to the Preferences Panel>Render. In the Troubleshooting section at the bottom under Command flushing try Rarely and Frequently to see if that improves things for you. You may also want to try None. Normally for an NVIDIA card None is the optimal choice. The Intel HD graphics have a spotty, but improving history. My laptop has dual HD4600 and an NVIDIA Quadro K1100M. Both seem to perform well. The HD3000 series was the first Intel hardware that started to be OK, but there were some drivers early on that had issues. We are currently looking at an issue with an HD3000 series that we can hopefully correct. There is another issue with a particular driver version that results in a crash all the time that is unfixable without a driver update. Usually with the Intel graphics starting with about the HD3000 newer drivers fix a lot of issues. But not all laptop vendors provide the most recent drivers which complicates life for all of us.

There is a hash added to the name to make the file unique. Without this there is the possibility of having multiple files vie for the same name in the archive location leading to real confusion and possibly overwriting of the archive. However, we could probably come up with a shorter name. The 260 character limit (counting drive name) is an annoying limitation of Windows. A number of years ago they added support at the file system level for paths up to 32000 characters long. But didn't add that support to Explorer or most other parts of the operating system. So while we could write code to allow Chief to read and write to those longer names fairly easily, the OS limitation would result in those files causing Explorer to fail miserably. For example those long paths would not be able to be deleted from Explorer. This is one of several file system issues that I find very annoying with Windows. This is still a problem in Windows 8.1. I would hope that it would get corrected in Windows 10, but I'm not going to hold my breath on that one. The 255 character limit on a singe file name is actually common among other operating systems. It is the limit for Mac and Linux systems, including smart phones. However, the path name limit on most other systems is a minimum of 1024 characters which is much more reasonable. One thing that you can do is to change the location of your chief data folder to something like "C:\Rob\Documents\CAX6Data\". I would also suggest being more conservative on the length of your file names.

Good. That should work. It would probably be good to do a bit practice going back and forth until you are confident that it is working for you. When you find what works well for you stick with what works. Sorry that you got caught by some of the less than obvious things in using Chief.

Put your layout files in the same folder as your plan. Or put your plans in a folder that is in the same folder as your layout. There is a search order that starts in the same folder as your layout and then starts looking in sub folders for associated plan files. Failing to find your plan in the same folder or a sub folder it will fall back to looking at the full path.