Performance Options

Hardware Accelerated Rendering

If supported by your graphics card, SA provides OpenGL™ hardware acceleration for the graphical view. As the default option, it provides a significant performance increase—particularly with complex models and large amounts of geometry.

SA recommends Hardware Accelerated Rendering if possible. This option can help identify if a problem is related to the graphics card. Improved performance when this is turned off means you have a problem with the graphics driver.

The Graphic Device is also listed here. This display identifies which graphics card your computer is currently using. A higher end computer will often have both an integrated graphics card and a high speed stand alone card. It can also be helpful to verify that SA is trying to use (or has access to) the high performance card.

SA has a built-in Frames-per-second (FPS) ) monitor determines if hardware acceleration is improving rendering performance in your job. The FPS monitor displays a running average of the rendered frame rate. The progress bar under the frame rate shows how “full” the measurement buffer has become. For the most accurate value, continue rotating the view until this buffer is nearly full.

To Test the Effectiveness of Hardware Acceleration on Your Machine:

Enable the display Frames-per-Second (FPS) Monitor option.

The Frames-per-second (FPS) monitor indicates how quickly the graphical view is being redrawn.