Altium 18 3D Performace

[Blue_Alien]

Been using AD 18 for over a week now. Has anyone else noticed that the 3D performance has decreased? Navigating in 3D is noticeably laggier.

[olkipukki]

I noticed performance degradation on AD17 once I "upgraded"  my workstation from i7 X-Series to Xeon CPU (that two years younger)... for sake to add extra cores to run VMs smoothly and compomise almost 1GHz raw power, so AD heavily relies on a single-thread stuff.

AD18 performs much better and noticeable improvements especially for PCB/3D world.
Building DirectX scenes might take ages on AD17 and CPU/GPU utilisation exceed many times compare to AD18, AD18 - different story.

For example, try AD18 Mini PC multi-board example 

[JamesH-AltiumOfficial]

Hi Blue_Alien and blueskull,

Most feedback has been improvements in speed in AD18 so I'm wondering whether you can provide me with your project as well as system specs?

Your project may impact somehow, or your system may have some old drivers or a configuration with not much Processing power (GFLOPS), for example a powerful GPU like the Radeon RX 470 with GFLOPS=3793 would be exploited by the enhanced technology in AD18.

If you're able to send files, please PM me and I'll provide you with a method for receiving confidential files.

Best regards,

James Harriman
Altium

[cadguy68]

Total 3D slowdown here with V18.  V17 and below work absolutely fine, and quick, even with high levels of anti-aliasing.

Flipping a board over in 3D mode in V18 is comical - it takes sooooooo freaking long.

Unusable for me.

[Paulvanavesaath]

I have noticed the complete opposite. 3D is way faster with me compared to altium 17, and I am a heavy 3D user. meshing is so fast, were altium 17 is going about it on a Smarc module for ages, altium 18 just imports it and shows it.
maybe updating or re installing altium might fix the problem.

also altium 18 can use a lot more memory than altium 17, so if memory swapping to the HDD is going on then that might be something to look at.

for your info, i have a intel core I7-7700, with 32 gig Ram. also a Nvidia Quadro P4000...

[Blue_Alien]

Hey, sorry for the late update. I got it figured out. Turns out I needed to select the preferred graphics card in my system graphics settings. It was set to the intel CPU graphics instead of the GPU.