Capture / Allegro V17.4 Issues

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.

Thank you for the reply, I have already had that variable set...no help. I love the monitors, not sure if they needed to be 4K but when you buy a high end monitor that's what you're going to get from Dell anyways... Thanks for the calc compliment

Thank you for the reply, I have already had that variable set...no help. I love the monitors, not sure if they needed to be 4K but when you buy a high end monitor that's what you're going to get from Dell anyways... Thanks for the calc compliment