17.4 HF019 - GPU Support - Skeletal View gone !

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-)

"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." Just the installation of the Sigrity tools is required, the components are no longer included because they would be duplicated in both installations and potentially different versions between the two installationsbue to differing release schedules.

For any graphics with a "workstation class" card installed, check that you have the latest drivers from the graphics card vendor site installed, if that is an option. The performance of "workstation class" cards can vary widely between the drivers provided by Windows Update and those provided directly from the graphics card vendor.