Question about Hardware Accelleration

Hello everyone

I don't know a lot about CAD and 3D, so I hope you will be able to help me.

One of my users are running ADT 2005 and Autocad 2004 on a HP NC8000 laptop
with 512 MB of RAM . This laptop contains a ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Series
graphic adapter with 64 MB RAM.
When my user enables 3D Hardware accelleration i ADT, the performance is
slower than if he's not enabling hardware accelleration. The system is using
the latest videodriver available from HP. Don you need to do anything apart
from installing the videodriver and enabling Hardware accelleration to make
it work, or is the ATI adapter just not capable of perfoming well?

yours sincerely

Jakob Svarrer

 

To the best of my knowledge Autocad does not use hardware acceleration.
The 9600 has pretty good hardware acceleration, and if Autocad were
ritten to use it, would be a suitable product, but if Autocad does't use
the hardware acceleration, I don't see the point of a sophisticated
videocard on the machine unless you are also using it for gaming.

 

Sounds like you need more RAM. According to the specs, the minimum for 2004
is 512 megs; 2005 and 2006 require a gig. The programs will still run with
less, just slow as molasses. The more RAM the merrier--you will really see a
difference. Don't bother getting more than 2 gigs, though. As currently
configured, Windows doesn't recognize anything over 2 gigs.

Marc

 

Hello Marc
So the use of Hardware Accelleration raises the need for more RAM? I was
begun to think, that it could be an issue of the ATI Radeon Mobility card
not being fully OpenGL compliant. The laptop is running quite acceptable
when Hardware accelleration is not enabled.

Best regards
Jakob

 

No, the actual program requires more RAM. Read the "Minimum System
Requirements" in the manual or on the outside of the box your ACAD came in.
It's spelled out pretty clearly. It may be that your laptop has enough brute
force to calculate its way through a CAD session despite theoretically not
having enough RAM. It will definitely run better (you may be pleasantly
surprised) with more.

Not sure about your hardware acceleration question though. ATI is a very
reputable graphics card.

Marc

 

Jakob,

Autocad ADT 2006 requires 1GB of RAM?? Why????????

We just upgraded our desktop from 256 to 1GB thinking we'd be in the clear for a transition to 2006!


SG

 

Well I run both with 512MB and they work well enough