System & Performance Enhancements

The feature documented here is no longer part of the software beyond version 15.1. Click to return to: Altium Designer Documentation for version 24

Applies to Altium Designer version: 15.1

Altium Designer 15.0 delivers a number of system and performance-related enhancements, including:

  • The drawing speed of large schematics has been improved, by caching bounding rectangles and clipping graphical objects which don't fit the current view port.
  • The speed of teardrop removal has been improved.
  • On densely wired schematics, placing a wire with the Break Wires at Autojunction option enabled has been optimized, with marked improvement in speed.
  • Schematic dragging has been further developed to improve wire/bus bending and reduce the likelihood of a netlist change.
  • Improved performance of selection and zooming in Schematic.
  • The path tracing routines used for creating a polygon from selected primitives have been improved, to better handle small objects and multiple paths.
  • The time to open the PCB Editor's Object Class Explorer dialog has been substantially reduced, particularly on designs with a large number of classes. Class membership is now only loaded and displayed when the class is selected.
  • The speed of updating from libraries or a database has been improved for designs that include variants using alternate parts.
  • Improved speed of project compilation.
  • Support for high DPI screens using oversized fonts has been reviewed and improved.
  • Small improvements to the resources indicator, to only show information about memory, handles, and atoms, if the "safe" level (60% resource usage) is exceeded.
  • The Extensions & Updates view has been given a slight facelift. Aside from cosmetic changes that enhance its readability, it also benefits from the following usability improvements:
    • Separate Purchased but not installed options for the Software Extensions and Hardware Devices sections of the Purchased page.
    • Filter search functionality for quickly locating an extension within a section. Simply start typing the name of the extension you seek, and dynamic filtering will reduce the list within the section accordingly.
    • Ability to install (or remove) all extensions in a section (Software Extensions, Hardware Devices). Simply click the relevant control to the right of the section's name.
Note that all extensions in a section will be installed/removed, irrespective of whether a current search filter has reduced the displayed list to only a subset of the extensions in that section.
Note

The features available depend on your level of Altium Designer Software Subscription.