Pan & Zoom Very Slow in Allegro 17.4 - HF005 & Prior Versions - Windows 10

Installed SP5  At this company, my designs aren't complex.  

Found a Xilinx demo DB from an old project:  HW-Z1-ZCU106.  I see a wait symbol briefly if I have all of the positive planes visible..   You are right, net name display has improved.  

This is an HP Z2 G4 mini with P1000 Nvidia graphics  (I can quickly hide from my chatty coworkers in the cube farm.)

Hi RF thanks for the response. So you are seeing the pause too aka graphics lag. I ran some additional checks and typically my designs are not very complex "RF Based Designs" so lots of ground planes etc.

On designs that are complex for example a computer motherboard that have lots of nets and constraints 17.4 is really bad on my system. I cant use it. The screen lag is bad but 17.2 does not have that issue at all so it is somewhat perplexing as to what is really going on.

I think on the CCR's which are good there should be a category for "Graphics Related issues" such as Open Gl performance etc.

I am running Radeon Pro Graphics here as it works good for other cad tools too. One interesting thing is that win 10 has the ability to report the GPU id and usage via the task manager. In comparing 17.4 to 17.2  on the exact same design and exactly the same hardware the gpu stats are basically very similar, kind of splitting hairs really but on my monitor whats actually getting rendered is slower in 17.4 than 17.2. It is plausible that the GPU Metric that shows in the task manager is not really representing what is physically getting drawn on the monitor but only looking at a lower level such as gpu cycles etc .... Not too sure.

My thinking is just putting something out there that the issue pertains to Open Gl rendering and how the compositor for 17.4 is being utilized. Clearly something has changed from 17.2 but not in a good way in this regard.

All the best..."Happy Easter" :)

Ugh, that sucks.  One thing is you can set the 17.2 compatibility mode and downgrade all of the 17.4 dbs to 17.2 (not sure what the differences are.)

I don't have the intel graphics drivers installed on this mini desktop.

There is a problem where you can force an app to always use the Intel built-in graphics to save battery life on laptops.

>(Windows Settings)

Hi RF, I wanted to circle back on this issue. I had tried your suggestions but the issue of lethargic display performance still exists in 17.4.

I recently upgraded my system here to a more Modern PC and while certain operations are now faster the actual display speed in 17.4 SP rev 006 is still in a word "Not Good" when compared to 17.2 running on the exact same hardware.

I have isolated the issue. The issue is for the most part related to the "START PAGE" in allegro. If the start page is enabled as it is by default display performance is pretty close to the performance that exists in 17.2. It is really close but still not as fast. I would say probably it is 80% or so of 17.2's speed performance and on newer HW most users would probably not notice this.

Now if you disable the "Start Page" from the user preferences and re-start allegro and then load a moderate to large board the display performance becomes really bad. It is pretty useless IMHO.

Typically I never use the Start Page. Personally i don't like it but some users might and it could be useful in a corporate environment to display certain info to a PCB team. That been said the thing needs a "Fix" Quickly.

This is kind of like that esoteric issue with the blurry netnames that just magically got fixed in the last release S05 but never got documented as an issue on the CCR.

There are other hidden gems in 17.4 too. For example users of the STD version of Orcad wont be able to export their designs to "Specctra" so if you happen to know designers that use specctra to route boards your gonna be really suprised if you migrate to 17.4 because the export to specctra functionality is "GONE" GONE as in taken out. They forgot to remove it from the menu's too :).
Pretty sad eh.

For folks that might be interested I can convey that Allegro running on a AMD Ryzen 5 3600X with 16g of ram and a good SSD coupled with a radeon pro video card they can expect blistering performance out of allegro running on win-10. It is seriously fast. In allegro on very large boards the multi-threaded performance on DRC is pretty awesome. It's like blip and DRC updates.

So in summary steps to test display issue in 17.4

Start Allegro so that it displays it's "Start Page"  and load a board" Do pan and zoom etc on a moderate sized board and see how responsive it is.
Disable start page via user preferences so the startpage is turned off and restart allegro.
Load a board and do pan & zoom. see if display performance is bad. "Mine is bad" notice the circular icon showing up at the center of the cursor during zoom steps.

All the best..

Kudos on the new machine.   I try to convince engineers to get laptops with GPU s but they keep choosing battery life and weight.

Embedded browser libraries are offered up as a canned feature to developers using Microsoft Visual Studio.  Hope they fix it quickly (I never use those either.)  

Did not know that about Spectra.  It's not mentioned in the "17.4 changes" ILS training.   The worst boards of my career were done with the worst host tools (Scicards, PCAD, Boardstation) but thank God CCT/Specctra.always aced ECL net topology and matched length.   Did you ever get to use Harris/Scicards/Xynetix EDA Artist?   They had an even better interactive routing tool that used CCT file formats in the early 90's before they were sold to Avant! back in 1999...