X6 Graphics and rendering issue

[sdsinc]

Hey all,

I installed the new release of X6 the other day and have had a problem with rendering. So I contact CA and opened a service ticket and after back and forth for a couple of days a few things have come up and I am asking for some assistance from the group in case anyone can help.

I will make this as short as I can -

The problem is a black screen. When I rotate a model (any view) the background will go black. When I select final render or final render with shadows the active screen will go black. So after much help from CA we have determined that I need to set my hardware smoothing to 0 and software smoothing to zero. This eliminates the black screen and produces the final view/final view w/shadow without incident. Except the line quality is very poor - almost Atari like. Jagged edges and the like. FYI none of the other settings improve or degrade this behavior (i.e. optimizations, enhanced lighting, legacy shadows etc). The only settings that fix the problem are taking hardware smoothing to none and software smoothing to zero.

For whatever reason I have 3 drivers listed in the device manager. My NVidia GTX 675M driver (updated two days ago), an Intel HD Graphics 4000 driver, and a logmein mirror driver. CA suggested I remove the mirror driver (which I have) and they had me check which driver CA was using and low and behold its using the Intel driver. Which BTW windows tells me is up to date. I have no idea why its using that driver - and scared as **** to remove it - and I cannot figure out exactly how to change it from using Intel to using the Nvidia. And if I should?

Any help here would be appreciated. What is really interesting here is that X5 had no issues. A check of the video card status in X5 revealed that it too was using the Intel graphics and not the Nvidia and also that X5 was set to include BOTH hardware and software smoothing.

For the folks smarter than me I have included the screen shots of my system settings hoping one of you will see something and make a recommendation.

Thanks all,

Rich

[Ryan Matern]

Rich,

I'm fairly certain there is a more recent Intel driver for that card. The Windows Update Driver tool will frequently tell you that a driver is current when it isn't. I would check the Intel site for more recent drivers and see if that helps.

I'm unsure why Chief is using the Intel card and not the NVIDIA card. It is likely that there is a utility on your system for managing which gets used but I'm not sure what or where that would be.

[sdsinc]

Ryan,

Answer is as follows - and thanks for the follow up.

My computer with the i7 processor ships with BOTH on-board graphics (Intel) and a separate Nvidia GPU. When CA installed the computer assigns the on-board graphics to be used with CA. I had to manually go into the Nvidia control panel under 3D settings and assign the Nvidia GPU to be used when running CA.

All is running well now, but CA should know this for future.

Regards,

Rich

[perryh]

You should remove that Intel drivers and only use the NVidia card . The Nvidia card is so much better than the Intel. Chief has never worked good on Intel. Tech. support is very correct on what you should do.

[By your Builder]

Rich.

I wish I had posted my findings Tuesday when the same thing happened to me after downloading x6. All previous versions had worked great before but after x6 I did not have any camera views at all just a blank screen. I also contacted tech and was told the same thing and it did get it working even though it was very jagged looking. But while diagnosing the concern we found it was using the low grade built in video card , not the High dollar Nvidia card it was supposed to be running off of since I bought it about a year and a half ago. After setting it up properly in the Nvidia control panel all is well. Thanks to Chief in a round about way I fixed a issue I didn't even know I had. Now I can jack up the smoothing settings an get great views and is faster THANKS CHIEF..

[Lin]

Alas, I have the jagged edge problem, too. It is my video card. It was fine with x5, but x6 is a leap too far for it. I most likely will need to buy a new laptop soon (time for a new one, anyway). In the meanwhile, I've switched back to x5.

Does anyone have a laptop that they feel is working especially well with X6?