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TomTom  
#1 Posted : Monday, December 23, 2013 12:33:31 PM(UTC)
TomTom

Rank: Junior Member

Joined: 12/13/2013(UTC)
Posts: 6

Hey,

although I'm already in contact with support, I thought I'd post my problem here as well, since so far support couldn't find a solution and maybe somebody in the community has an idea or solution already:

I recently bought ViaCAD Pro 8 but so far am pretty much unable to use it.
I encounter massive graphics glitches while moving object with the gripper or drawing.
The header with the values is corrupted as well as the drawing area.
When I rotate the view, the view is refreshed and looks okay until I do more drawing or constructing etc.
I can refresh the header only by minimizing and maximizing the window.

I've been through the whole enchilada of standard solutions with support already:
- Compatibility mode for XP/Windows7/off.
- Deinstalling and reinstalling the latest version.
- Disabling the second monitor/changing display resolutions.
- Running Dxdiag which turned out just fine.

My machine is running a broad range of software for 3D, 2D, Video and Audio flawlessly - ViaCAD is the only software showing this problem.

I tried the Beta 9 as well but it makes no difference.

My specs: i7 6 core/12 threads @ 4.1 Ghz, Windows 8.0 Pro x64 all updates but not 8.1, Nvidia Gforce GTX 660 TI with 2 Gig Ram & latest drivers, 32 GB Ram, Asus Motherboard.

The problems I see are not as bad as in the Demoversion, which was ViaCAD 6 (I could hardly see anything so bad were the artefacts) but they are so bad that I can't really use the software.

While for instance moving something with the gripper, the text, entry fields and graphics in the header get totally corrupted like I've last seen it in Windows 95 times.

Also, the screen isn't correctly updated so I don't directly see what the gripper is doing but only get the result after I release the mouse.

The other thing is, that while drawing, I see some kind of ghost image of old lines and stuff instead of the current ones. When I rotate the view this is cleaned up and looks okay again.

Somehow it feels as if some kind of "overlay" doesn't work correctly. As if I see old buffers.

I do 3D for almost 20 years and would call myself a rather advanced user, but this has me stumped.

So if anybody would have an idea where to look or what to look for, I'd be very thankful.

Cheers,

Tom

I can post screenshots if that should help.
Filip  
#2 Posted : Monday, December 23, 2013 1:45:03 PM(UTC)
Filip

Rank: Senior Member

Joined: 12/30/2010(UTC)
Posts: 126

Do you have two Video cards?

If you have laptop then maybe you work on Intel 4000 instead of 660m
TomTom  
#3 Posted : Monday, December 23, 2013 2:27:43 PM(UTC)
TomTom

Rank: Junior Member

Joined: 12/13/2013(UTC)
Posts: 6

No, it's a desktop with only one card.

Thanks for the suggestion,

Cheers,

Tom
psalmu  
#4 Posted : Tuesday, December 24, 2013 12:13:06 AM(UTC)
psalmu

Rank: Junior Member

Joined: 7/31/2012(UTC)
Posts: 5

I'd suggest updating Windows to 8.1 and see if it helps, since it's a generally good idea anyway.
TomTom  
#5 Posted : Tuesday, December 24, 2013 4:31:50 AM(UTC)
TomTom

Rank: Junior Member

Joined: 12/13/2013(UTC)
Posts: 6

Some of my software doesn't work with 8.1 and generally I'm not very hot on the update since several of my node-locked software apps need re-authorization after the update, so I didn't plan to update anytime soon.

I would if I would be sure it would help with the issue, but I don't see how it should be connected. Dozens of other 3D software works just fine...
8.0 runs great...

Cheers,

Tom
BPL-RFE  
#6 Posted : Wednesday, December 25, 2013 4:10:17 AM(UTC)
BPL-RFE

Rank: Member

Joined: 11/16/2010(UTC)
Posts: 57

Was thanked: 2 time(s) in 1 post(s)
Hello.

I am not a real pro (at least IMHO).
But this looks (for me) as something that has to do with the 3D
settings of your NVIDIA Card.

Maybe the Vsync makes problems ?
[URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8IpHPAUKZw"]Look here on youtube[/URL] for changing this setting.

Hope this helps ...
Roland
TomTom  
#7 Posted : Wednesday, December 25, 2013 10:27:00 AM(UTC)
TomTom

Rank: Junior Member

Joined: 12/13/2013(UTC)
Posts: 6

Thanks Roland,

yeah, I played with several buffer-related settings, VSync being one of them and at one point it looked rather good, the glitches were reduced and I was able to see the moving object when using the gripper for the first time.

But I have to investigate some more since the problems weren't solved completely and all my other software didn't seem to like the setting much, Autodesk Softimage crashed on each start with those.
I guess I'll have to experiment with app-specific settings...

Tim Olson sent me a special beta that is supposed to solve some similar glitches on Windows 8.1 to what I'm seeing in 8.0 but I haven't got around to testing it.

Thanks and cheers,

Tom
david.  
#8 Posted : Sunday, December 29, 2013 2:05:17 PM(UTC)
david.

Rank: Junior Member

Joined: 1/28/2012(UTC)
Posts: 23

I have very similar problems with ViaCAD Pro 7 running on Win 8.1. My PC specs are very similar to yours.

i7 4770 Quad Core, 16 GB Ram, NVIDIA GTX 650 Ti video, Asus Z87M Plus M/B.

The software is essentially useless. I have tons of display artifacts when moving the select tool or other tools. Very disappointing. SketchUp 8 Pro works fine. So long ViaCAD.
Win 8.1
ViaCAD Pro 9.0.0 build 1109
Tim Olson  
#9 Posted : Thursday, January 2, 2014 10:54:47 AM(UTC)
Tim Olson

Rank: Senior Member

Joined: 2/2/2007(UTC)
Posts: 5,447
United States

Was thanked: 502 time(s) in 353 post(s)
If you are using Windows 8.1 with ViaCAD 8, contact Encore tech support for a minor patch update to address changes specific to 8.1.

http://support.encore.com/technicalsupport/

Tim
Tim Olson
IMSI Design/Encore
ZeroLengthCurve  
#10 Posted : Friday, January 3, 2014 3:40:06 AM(UTC)
ZeroLengthCurve

Rank: Senior Member

Joined: 5/15/2008(UTC)
Posts: 992

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Was thanked: 43 time(s) in 27 post(s)
If you have the time and space, you may want to consider running it through tests in a VM, since some of them have their own stock drivers different from the machine and different from what ms claims in the devices and hardware reporting tools.

I installed VCP 7 and 8 and Shark 8 on my win vista and win 7 machines over the past 4 years, and on stock windows, compared to vista and w7 in VirtualBox, I prefer VirtualBox to host win. VCP and Shark would cause (or maybe winv and win7 would croak?) winv and win7 to turn off compositing or some such internal rendering modes before VCP/Shark would start up. Not that it mattered much to me since I only have them there as sanity checks, and I virtually never use them natively.

But, I have over the past few months seen the header/readouts go white, fonts and lines draw bolded (a precursor to or indication of Slt being past a state of safe use, and best shut down before losing the ability to shut down at my commmand rather than spontaneously), and even had instances of attempting to click on menus summarily killing Slt, taking down win7 and Slt in one keystroke or mouse click. At times is infuriating (when I'd have 40 minutes of unsaved work) and at other times is hilarious/incredible, and awe-inspiring to seek win7 go down in a lightning strike.

It seems to mostly or only happen to men when one of my ship drawings with around 10,000 non-solids and around 100 solids with some questionable (my definition, not necessarily the Slt ability to detect and or correct "questionable geometry") curves or surfaces, some that cause 5-minute load times, 3-minute saves, unless only lines, or splines are in view and most other layers are off prior to a save.

Sometimes, weird, greek-like fonts appear when I mid-stream of renaming a layer or trying to type anything other than numbers 0-9. Most shortcuts are not accepted, and only the basic, hardwired Punch! Shortcuts seem to operate. So, when I try to invoke my shortcuts to change view, draw a surface, or the the like, I now almost instinctively get a pit in my stomace and pause to ponder what I'm about to lose.

Sometimes, when this happens, the timing is just right to decompress, instead of swearing and pounding the desk, and pop in a DVD to take in 2 hours of drama or combat. Long saves durations disrupt work flow, and failure to remember to save risk marathon stretches going down the drain. I left my install disk far from my reach, and have no desire to do a complete win7 reinstall, as that requires reactivation. But my win7 install is not allowed to surf, and given the small number of apps I use, sandboxed/air-gapped from the dangers of cretins on the web, I feek okay having no patches on w7. So long as Punch! doesn't become nefarious too FORCE fail-start-on-dated-or-zero-patches, I can use my licensed installs. Fortunately, Tim is not one of those types of devs.

If you have VMWare, VBOX, or some other VM at your disposal, you may wish to see whether they make a grapical difference. OTOH, my report is probably no consolation. Then again, my machine HAS been online in SK and CN, and any number of agencies there and in the USA could have ransacked/pissed in my computer and I'd be none the wiser. I feel fortunate that I've been relatively unscathed, considering horror stories that abound (machines locked up under digital ransom, and so on.)

(I long for the day when developers make sandboxed apps that simply do not care which underlying OS is on the hardware. If I win a Powerball, I will buy up my favorite companies and pay them to make the bulk of the OS mostly irrelevant. But, I digress, and dream in futility. And, if I DID win a powerball, I'd be next in line for being decapped for daring to underrcut the bread and butter of one or two OS's methods of extracting cash from sofware devs, who in turn have to recoup from us, the end users what was scraped from them by certain OS companies.)

Note that my machine is dual-headed, 1366x708 or so on the laptop, andd 1920x10xx on the LCD. I cannot quite tell whether some of Slt's problems stem from the "main" window being on the laptop or on the extended screen, or whether it's relatedd to the 3,000,000 some pagefaults threshold reached at around 800-900 MB of RAM consumption. I just try to be mindful of wonky behavior and avoiding certain actions before doing a save. One that keep getting burned by is relatted to trying to select a control point of a spline that was derived from exploding off of the edge of a surface or solid. Certain splines that found life at some unknown-to-me stage of editing summarily CRASH Shark Lt by my mere temerity to lasso a single, seemingly harmless control point. When I'm unluck, I do not even see it coming because my focus is on the LCD, above my laptop, and the only time I know something went off the rails is when the UI is non-responsive, menus and buttons ignore clicks, and when I look down, I finally see "Shark has stopped working....", once my focus drifts or I blink and notice the dialog.

Fortunately, so far, Slt has not corrupted any of my drawings. Why do I stick with Shark? I am grateful that Tim made these programs what they are. The interface is clean/sparse and not overwhelmingly or maddeningly "busy", and because when I was on a tear to get GUI-managed solids, VC 2D/3D gave me that when TurboCAD was yanking my chain and taking me to the brink of despair and hopelessness. And, because I hold out hope that Tim will one day improve more unaddressed aspects of the layers (such as allowing user transplantation of snips of layer by importation, "grafting" and xref, something not yet possible in Slt. I'd like to save myself of some steps by copying-and-pasting geometry that carries along layers information about the entity and plops them right into the layer where I want them, without forcible acceptance of "Construction, Dimensions" other minimal branches. And, in general, I LIKE PUNCH!

Anyway, I hope your issues meet resolution!

Happy New Year, all!
ZeroLengthCurve  
#11 Posted : Friday, January 3, 2014 4:02:51 AM(UTC)
ZeroLengthCurve

Rank: Senior Member

Joined: 5/15/2008(UTC)
Posts: 992

Thanks: 20 times
Was thanked: 43 time(s) in 27 post(s)
BTW, while heating up a 2AM meal, I realized I'd be remiss to not mention that today, on a non-Shark day, a lowly, year 2002 app experienced the Greek-heiroglyphics-in-tiny-font malady. Sometimes that requires a peace-of-mind restart of windows and VBox. It may not even BE Shark or the complexity of my drawings. After all, I dedicate 4GB to VBox to dole out to win7, and my drawings only ever peaked at around 2GB on rare excursions, and mostly hover around 700mb, but occasionally reach 1.2 GB when I do "Show All".

But, between Slt and Win7, I've noticed that if I do several show-all, arround 5 or 6 Undos, and repeated dos and undos, something triggers a disconnect in the basic keyboard and graphics, resulting in torturously-crippled keyboard inputs and ruptured graphics, sometimes extending to Notepad not even accepting standard English. It never (to my awareness) happened BEFORE going overseas last year, but, then that trip started in May, and in 2012-02, I'd just upgraded my Slt install. So, I may for months have not visually realized what was going on, if back then the same issues occurred. It could be just the intensive use of SLT is exposing system instability that occurs only at certain scenarios.

Some of this forced me to actually start using XREFs, one of the very features that motivated me to buy Slt v8 to u/g v7 in the firstt place.

As for any graphics lagginess, for the most part, I think they seem ok for me, tho lately (about a month now) I've been on a dual-headed setup, and am still trying to suss out matters.

Rgds,

ZLC
david.  
#12 Posted : Friday, January 3, 2014 12:36:44 PM(UTC)
david.

Rank: Junior Member

Joined: 1/28/2012(UTC)
Posts: 23

Originally Posted by: Tim Olson Go to Quoted Post
If you are using Windows 8.1 with ViaCAD 8, contact Encore tech support for a minor patch update to address changes specific to 8.1.

http://support.encore.com/technicalsupport/

Tim


Any patches for VC 7 Pro? I'm now in the position to pay for an upgrade that would still need a patch to work with 8.1. Why should I have to do that? I might as well look for something else that already works with 8.1. If I had known upfront that VC was so specific to an OS version, I probably would have gone a different route.
Win 8.1
ViaCAD Pro 9.0.0 build 1109
Tim Olson  
#13 Posted : Friday, January 3, 2014 1:26:15 PM(UTC)
Tim Olson

Rank: Senior Member

Joined: 2/2/2007(UTC)
Posts: 5,447
United States

Was thanked: 502 time(s) in 353 post(s)
Hi David

My apologies,but no update patches are planned for VC7. VC7 was released several years ago where we had no idea of the changes Microsoft would make with 8.0. VC7 was tested and released for Windows 7, so if you stay with VC7, I would recommend using Windows 7. I think you will find most software is released with certain OS requirements as software developers cannot anticipate future OS changes. Generally, I find Microsoft is much better then Apple regarding compatibility issues of older software with newer versions of the OS. However with 8.0, Microsoft introduced some significant changes with OpenGL, 2D graphics, and how these technologies work with their window manager.

If you do upgrade to a newer version of ViaCAD, I would urge you to try out the trial or beta builds to make sure it is compatible with your OS and video drivers.

If anyone has graphic issues with VC8 and Windows 8, contact tech support for an update that may fix the problem. (Same update given to Tom).

Tim
Tim Olson
IMSI Design/Encore
TomTom  
#14 Posted : Saturday, January 4, 2014 8:26:59 AM(UTC)
TomTom

Rank: Junior Member

Joined: 12/13/2013(UTC)
Posts: 6

A good new year to everybody!

The patch from Tim solved my problems here so far.
Great and fast support! Thanks a lot for that Tim!
I was a bit concerned there for a while.

I'll have to spend some more quality time with ViaCAD Pro to see how it holds with more involved scenes.

In the meantime I also updated to Windows 8.1 since I found a solution for the one software that didn't work with it over the holidays. Not sure if that made a difference though.

BTW. I don't get forum notifications on thread-replies although I explicitly enabled them. Anything special I need to do?

BTW2. Every time I post something in this forum I get the following error message:
"Remote server or file not found

You tried to access the address http://forum.punchcad.com/newre....php?do=postreply&t=4918, which is currently unavailable. Please make sure that the web address (URL) is correctly spelled and punctuated, then try reloading the page."

My post is going through anyway, but it's weird to see this error every time. Am I the only one seeing this? I use Opera here...

Thanks a lot for the help and support!

Cheers,

Tom
ZeroLengthCurve  
#15 Posted : Saturday, January 4, 2014 8:46:37 PM(UTC)
ZeroLengthCurve

Rank: Senior Member

Joined: 5/15/2008(UTC)
Posts: 992

Thanks: 20 times
Was thanked: 43 time(s) in 27 post(s)
Is there a patch for Slt 8 v8.0.0 build 1003, running on win 7 non-service-packed?

I'm noticing that when I xref in objects having text, the text is there, and the control points show, but the text is not visible except during brief slices of time when the model is tilted.

Does anyone else have the problem? It might be my machine, but I don't see why non-xrefed objects do not have the problem.

Regards.

ZLC
david.  
#16 Posted : Sunday, January 5, 2014 2:55:54 PM(UTC)
david.

Rank: Junior Member

Joined: 1/28/2012(UTC)
Posts: 23

Originally Posted by: Tim Olson Go to Quoted Post
Hi David

My apologies,but no update patches are planned for VC7. VC7 was released several years ago where we had no idea of the changes Microsoft would make with 8.0. VC7 was tested and released for Windows 7, so if you stay with VC7, I would recommend using Windows 7. I think you will find most software is released with certain OS requirements as software developers cannot anticipate future OS changes. Generally, I find Microsoft is much better then Apple regarding compatibility issues of older software with newer versions of the OS. However with 8.0, Microsoft introduced some significant changes with OpenGL, 2D graphics, and how these technologies work with their window manager.

If you do upgrade to a newer version of ViaCAD, I would urge you to try out the trial or beta builds to make sure it is compatible with your OS and video drivers.

If anyone has graphic issues with VC8 and Windows 8, contact tech support for an update that may fix the problem. (Same update given to Tom).

Tim


Thanks for the reply. At this point, I uninstalled from my Win 8.1 machine. Luckily, I have secondary Win 7 machine. I've installed onto that machine. I'm running VC 7 Pro from there now. That will work for me until things get working on the upgrades for Win 8.1. I had just hoped to have it running on my primary PC.
Win 8.1
ViaCAD Pro 9.0.0 build 1109
mmoe  
#17 Posted : Monday, January 6, 2014 11:41:57 PM(UTC)
mmoe

Rank: Junior Member

Joined: 7/13/2013(UTC)
Posts: 5

Originally Posted by: TomTom Go to Quoted Post
Thanks Roland,

yeah, I played with several buffer-related settings, VSync being one of them and at one point it looked rather good, the glitches were reduced and I was able to see the moving object when using the gripper for the first time.

But I have to investigate some more since the problems weren't solved completely and all my other software didn't seem to like the setting much, Autodesk Softimage crashed on each start with those.
I guess I'll have to experiment with app-specific settings...

Tim Olson sent me a special beta that is supposed to solve some similar glitches on Windows 8.1 to what I'm seeing in 8.0 but I haven't got around to testing it.

Thanks and cheers,

Tom


I see that you have already had better luck with the patch, but I thought I'd mention that you can also create profiles that are application specific for the NVIDIA card. You just go to "Program Settings" tab instead of the "Global Settings" tab and configure it specifically for Viacad. May not make a lot of difference, but might be worth a shot since you can do so without messing it up for the rest of your applications. At least in theory.....
TomTom  
#18 Posted : Tuesday, January 7, 2014 7:15:50 AM(UTC)
TomTom

Rank: Junior Member

Joined: 12/13/2013(UTC)
Posts: 6

Originally Posted by: mmoe Go to Quoted Post
I see that you have already had better luck with the patch, but I thought I'd mention that you can also create profiles that are application specific for the NVIDIA card. You just go to "Program Settings" tab instead of the "Global Settings" tab and configure it specifically for Viacad. May not make a lot of difference, but might be worth a shot since you can do so without messing it up for the rest of your applications. At least in theory.....


Thanks mmoe,

yeah, I tried that as well, but the settings changes didn't solve all the problems reliably so I'm really happy that the latest patch actually solves all of them for me.

Basically I think that an application like ViaCAD should run on normal machines with normal hardware with default settings.
In this day and age it makes no sense anymore to have the user fiddle with buffer settings and the like. That was okay back in the 90ies when CAD was still something taxing and special, but today even a smartphone has more CPU power than one of the old Silicon Graphics machines and current gaming cards are blazingly fast, so it's mostly a question of how well the application is using that power.

When I can work with millions or billions of polygons in one software and get slowdown-problems with several thousand in another, I know where to point my finger ;-)

Cheers,

Tom
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