Capture / Allegro V17.4 Issues

Here is a video showing Capture issues.
I really want to know if anyone is seeing these on their systems.

www.youtube.com/watch

Here is a video showing an issue I'm having with dual monitors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bzA0XGOx3Q

Hi Kenneth.

I took a look at your videos. Recently there was a post about 4K scaling issues and here is a link.

https://community.cadence.com/cadence_technology_forums/f/pcb-design/47428/pcb-editor-interface-not-scaled-on-high-resolution-displays/1372437#1372437

This may or may not help you out for the PCB Editor, not too sure if it is related or not.

So consider yourself fortunate that you actually got a response from Cadence, I am on the Orcad Pro version of the PCB editor and did not have much success reporting the issue I encountered which pertained to physical display speed in 17.4. Things like Pan. Zoom & general operations etc are alot slower on the exact same hardware and the same OS "Win 10" than in 17.2. What I have noticed is that on a moderate to large sized board for example an x86 motherboard 17.4 kind of falls off a cliff for display speed. I run 108OP on a Radeon Pro graphics card designed for 2D cad. The system I have is a fairly highend AMD Ryzen based one.

On the PCB Editor what I see here is that the display speed is related to the Start Page in Allegro. Personally I do not like the start page and there is an option to disable it in the user preferences. Doing this means an even bigger hit on my system. It has been this way since DAY 1 of the release. The thing is just not usable IMHO. This issue does not exist on 17.2.

I am talking the exact same HW & OS here not different systems.

Early on in 17.4 there was an open-gl issue too but that got resolved. Net names on clines were not getting displayed correctly in OpenGl. Basically they looked like regular fonts.Funny thing on this is it never appeared in any CCR and magically disappeared after complaints.

In your videos Capture looks to be pretty well broken. That is not usable with the constant refresh every time you click. The selection of multiple components seems poor. It is like the database is trying to count whats selected. That particular issue was also reported way back last year as I recall. I had not been actively using 17.4 capture & PCB Editor due to the display issues but will fire up capture and see what I find.

I think Generally the Cadence PCB Editor is very very good. I like that Cadence publish CCR's about their software. As PCB Editors go and I have used them all Allegro would be my favorite. The only area where I feel Allegro is lacking is
when it comes to Library Management. In Allegro your talking about having a separate footprint and schematic symbol to represent that footprint. CIS kind of bridges that gap as does Orcad Capture but both tools are kind of like living on different Islands in that regard. Tools such as Mentor, Alt and even some of the lower tier tools have one database for both SCH Symbols and Pcb footprint. Huge advantage is your talking one file for your library and technically a more integrated solution. 

Getting back to your display issue. Is there any advantage to running 4K on your monitor size ?. Thing is were are talking 2d graphics here and if running 4K to represent 2d graphics your basically trowing bits away if that makes any sense. On a huge monitor I can see possibly that 4K might make sense, like 60" or more. Have you had  better success running 1080P at a high refresh rate instead of the 4K?.

BTW, Your PCB Calc is very good. My complements.

All the best.

Hi  - This looks like a mouse setting option, go to Control Panel - Mouse - Pointer Options tab and look at Snap to group and uncheck Automatically Move Pointer..... and then restart Allegro and see if that helps. For the errors you see I can't read them so can you put up a screenshot / give more detail but these may well be issues with allegro.ilinit / skill files that have issues.

Hi guys, here is an update and this may help some out. I have had a long standing issue with 17.4 pcb editor in that the performance aka graphics speed was sub par compared to 17.2. Anyway Steve's post prompted me to take a fresh look and dig in since official support didn't even respond to my question or issue to begin with other than asking for some system info.

So I am running 17.4 ISR S012 on Windows 10 Ver ( OS Build 18363.1379) and previously was running 17.2 ver of Orcad/Allegro.

Since I had a previous release it suffices to say everything was setup to my preferences. You know the drill, Scripts, Libs paths etc. On 17.4 I used my previous 17.2 .env file as it had all the settings so as to make the ramp up easier.

So the first thing I did was follow Steve's suggestion on the Skill file as a possible avenue to see if that was impacting display performance. I found this not to be an issue.

Next I said you know what I am going to blow out the .env file and start fresh. So doing that meant starting with an out of the box experience. To my delight after loading a board I found the display to be very responsive doing pan, zooms etc. This was somewhat illuminating to say the least as I had never seen 17.4 work that good.

Digging around I noticed that the menus were not legacy and changed them to that mode. Did a restart, display performance was still good. Then something dawned me. My display cursor is not full but just the small + so I changed the cursor to infinite.

Oh My, changing the opengl cursor to "Infinite" brought the display performance back to a sub par. It really slowed down the display speed. Enabling the bug nt check box didn't make any difference. So the display issue is the actual opengl "Infinite" Cursor. Try it out on 17.4 and see if you see the same thing. You should notice when you zoom in and out it is not fluid and a small refresh circle like one would see for a system busy mode appears between steps.

Plain English " OpenGl full screen cursor does not work as it did in 17.2" BUG !!!!

Going on a little further I found that start page even when disabled is having an impact too. In particular the Start Page when using the "Full Screen Cursor" adds to how badly the FSC works. Without using the FSC "Full Screen Cursor"
the Start Page looks to have minimal impact.

Everything else looked pretty good. I did notice that re-sizing the Options/Find/View panel produced alot of screen refreshes. 17.2 in this regard is the same. Panel graphics seem faster in say 16.6.

On Capture with ISR S012 I found no issues like what Kenneth showed in his video. Clicking on Symbol attributes and selecting things worked fine. Selecting multiple objects produced no visible display lag. Capture seems to be working normally. I couldn't check CIS as I don't have it.

In the earlier releases of 17.2 Capture did have these issues but they got resolved. Memory is foggy on that but I think a bunch of those issues were related to win10.

By way of a suggestion I think now when a Major release is made available that you just go with system defaults for the pcb editor and then load your custom .env file and confirm all is good in particular if that .env file was used on the prior release. Lastly I can confirm I found no issues with scripts etc. All seems to work good now.

Anyway that is what I found. Cadence Please fix the OpenGl Full Screen Cursor in 17.4.

All the best.