17.4 HF019 - GPU Support - Skeletal View gone !

Hi,

The skeletal view pertains mainly to the center click with the mouse which invokes elements not drawn in full so as to assist in zooming etc. In HF19 non filled pads and shape transparency is working fine via slider as per the norm.
I think possibly what you might be seeing is related to enabling that GPU support option. If possible try things out with that GPU option disabled..

One other thing to check is that your video drivers do support opengl. Allegro uses opengl for pretty much all graphics so hence the speed of allegro in this regards.

Still though Allegro does have OpenGl issues. Since HF08 Highlighting of any object has slowed down in a big way. With your cursor you can move it over objects at a moderate pace and if something like symbols is checked
in the find filter the entities will actually not highlight. Same for clines or anything else. The functionality for highlighting is a "Dead Stick"

Altium, Pads and even lower tier products do not have this issue. Highlighting speed in Allegro 17.4  has been nothing short of total "Junk" since HF8 service pack and all these release since that time have the same problem in this regards.

There are other hidden Gems in there too. Slightly off topic for users on Orcad with current upper tiered releases is that the timing vision functionality does not work because the software dependencies for sigrity components that used to
be included with allegro are no longer included. That reminds me of purchasing a car to find out Oh BTW we no longer include a spare tire after the fact when one needs it. Pretty sad IMHO.

Ok.  Hyundai wanted $300 for a spare tire.  That's 3 years of AAA service so...  

Ex, I have always appreciated your wisdom and insight.   

I have an HP G2 Z4 mini, that is about 8 inches square and 2 inches tall.   16gb of RAM   Not remarkable, IMHO. 

I don't think I have ever experienced any of your problems.

I dug into the high-speed ILS to get a more complex board to navigate like the Xilinx HW-Z1-ZCU106_Revision_1_0.brd file.

I am not experiencing any lag in 17.4.020 even when rolling over the ground net.

Have to ask what machine you are using?   

Do you have an NVidia or AMD graphics coprocessor.    My HP has a NVidia Quadro P1000 

Hi RF

Machine is a Ryzen 5 3600x with a Radeon Pro WX4100 vid card,  32GB ram, Intel ssd etc. OS is win 10. Desktop box.

On the exact same machine hardware and the exact same OS with 17.2 no issues exist.

Try this. Draw 10 parallel clines. Pass your mouse over them at a moderate to fast pace. Do they all highlight individually without delay or do some get missed ?.

Another thing to try.

Disable the start screen. Enable the full screen cursor. Restart Allegro.  how is the zoom in and out speed. ?

Total crap here....

Re-enable the start screen and restart allegro. Does the zoom in out performance increase ?

Appreciate your insight on this, let us know how it looks there. If good maybe I need a different vid card.

Thanks.

On my machine, when scanning over a group of CLINES on the Xilinx design I mentioned, it doesn't highlight about half of them as I move the cursor quickly using the cross cursor.   

Switching to infinite cursor, I have to pause for the net to highlight.   I haven't needed to use the full-screen/infinite cursor.

With the smaller scale of projects, I can't complain about this.   I spend too much time in P*DS and A*ium to notice differences between 17.2 and 17.4 (had to go back to 17.2 for a while after adding a dodgy step model that 17.4 didn't like.) 

Do you highlight with a stipple pattern (Enormously handy for me but not sure if the GPU helps here) or do you use a single color override or the shadow mode?

Probably doesn't matter.  But, the Radeon Pro card is not on the 17.4 release notes Page 12 for Supported GPUs 

I don't think you would need an expensive NVidia card to try.   The P1000 I have with 4gb of DDR4 is designed for workstation-class laptops.

On my machine, when scanning over a group of CLINES on the Xilinx design I mentioned, it doesn't highlight about half of them as I move the cursor quickly using the cross cursor.   

Switching to infinite cursor, I have to pause for the net to highlight.   I haven't needed to use the full-screen/infinite cursor.

With the smaller scale of projects, I can't complain about this.   I spend too much time in P*DS and A*ium to notice differences between 17.2 and 17.4 (had to go back to 17.2 for a while after adding a dodgy step model that 17.4 didn't like.) 

Do you highlight with a stipple pattern (Enormously handy for me but not sure if the GPU helps here) or do you use a single color override or the shadow mode?

Probably doesn't matter.  But, the Radeon Pro card is not on the 17.4 release notes Page 12 for Supported GPUs 

I don't think you would need an expensive NVidia card to try.   The P1000 I have with 4gb of DDR4 is designed for workstation-class laptops.

I have 16.6, 17.2 and 17.4 ready to go for reasons I'm not proud of.

When holding down the middle button/scroll wheel, the CLINES are drawn per the transparency setting as rectangles.  

But, the action is identical panning around in either 17.2.074 and 17.4.020

So even on your pc the problems exist. So here is the thing on this. On a large board & I am talking something like an x86 Motherboard the display performance in highlighting and for those of us that use the full screen cursor which is extremely handy for alignment of elements this 17.4 is a "DOG" not usable. The larger the board the worse it gets even on some serious hardware. By contrast on the older 17.2 allegro life is good. Going back to the 32bit 16.6 display speed is even faster.

One more thing on the highlighting and it is not very obvious. When you highlight objects the physical highlight colour you select is not the colour that gets used. Say what ?, What I mean is say your highlight color is a solid red. Highlight the clines and they are not that solid colour but a blend of red and the colour of the clines.

Now I  will admit the highlight colour is not a show stopper but it illustrates a deeper issue. That would be a compositing issue with the open gl engine.

My personal preference is to use a solid colour for highlighting, I don't like the stipple and have that defeated via the user preferences, "Display_Nohighlightfont"

There are in the industry some seriously big guns using Allegro. I honestly do not see how 17.4 is viable due to these display issues. The deeper issue is the stuff went out the door defunct ! possibly because some things got missed during beta test etc. 20 revisions later there still missing them.

On the video cards provided your card supports open gl allegro will work good on a very low end card. Even on a large board the resources used from a graphics only perspective is actually really low because open gl is doing the heavy lifting for the graphics speed. The most important part for allegro would be the cpu power and speed. The bias is to cpu cycles because it has to compute all the DRC  and things like a large array of rules.

BTW getting back to the skeletal view, aka press down middle mouse wheel to do zoom extents etc, speed on 17.4 for that operation is on par with the full screen cursor which is abysmal.

Hey nothing wrong with that. Seems pretty smart to me :), I do the same but not with 17.4 as it is not up to par here. Hopefully it will get fixed.

A Tier1 here in the bay area runs RHEL.  Was thinking of getting an OS license and checking it out.  (I would die if I couldn't use Downstream Blueprint, so..)

Definitely deal with embedded-class designs, not workstation motherboards.  Thank you for the context.   

It's midnight here, so I'll read your response tomorrow.  B-)