Performance and Efficiency Upgrade to PCB Graphics System
A significant effort has been put into re-engineering the DirectX graphics engine for PCB environment in the Altium Designer Winter 09 release. This has resulted in greatly improved performance with lower memory overhead and enabled some significant new features.
Improved performance and lower memory
The new graphic engine takes full advantage of the memory resources on your video resulting in many improvements including
- Reduced usage of main system memory as more data is held directly in video memory
- Improved performance due to less data transfer requirements across the AGP or PCIe buses
- Improved performance due to data always being available for the GPU to process.
Over and above the general performance increase, improvements in the architecture of the engine have also enabled extra performance improvements in specific areas
- Switching in or out of Single Layer Mode.
- Changing layers whilst in Single Layer Mode.
- Highlighting operations - both Masking and Dimming.
- Transparent Layers Mode in 2D
Performance comparison of graphics cards
Video cards are a critical hardware element that can have a large impact on both the performance and stability of systems. These benchmarks help you choose the right 3D PCB graphics engine for your needs and budget. Choose the right hardware requirements necessary to achieve stunning results, make the whole system more responsive and 'feel' better, and remove distractions to design caused by lags in the GUI.