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Darker Colors in Allegro PCB Venture License After Enabling Nvidia GPU Usage (SPMHGF-10)

iriley

Hello

I recently updated PCB Editor from 17.4 Hotfix 11 to Hotfix 34. When I loaded up a board with the Allegro PCB Venture license for the first time with the new hotfix installed, it asked me if I wanted to use my Nvidia GPU for something (Nvidia Quadro RTX 3000). I don't remember the exact language, but the message code was SPMHGF-10. When I reloaded the board, the colors were significantly darker. I opened up the same board with the Allegro PCB Designer license, and the colors were brighter, same as before I updated to hotfix 34.

How do I get the brighter colors back, without having to switch PCB licenses? The only clue I have is that when I load a board with the Venture license, the command window has an extra line saying "Loaded GPU Plugin from: plugins/gpu". Where can I find this location, and how do I revert it what it was before?

This article below also states it's in someplace called "Registry/Settings". I don't know where that is either: 

https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/pcb/posts/move-to-17-4-2019-hotfix019-of-allegro-pcb-editor

I'll put some images below. Notice how one image has significantly darker pin numbers and dimensions. I also made sure Shadow mode was disabled, so that's not the issue: 


  • 0

    You may check which graphic card tool is picking with the license used using "Tools > Utility > OpenGL Status".

    If thing are good without the NV card, disable the NV card.

    We can block this NV Graphic Card popup with the help of the environment variable nv_plugin_path.

    For Windows: nv_plugin_path= plugins/gpu

    For Linux: nv_plugin_path= plugins/gpu/64bit

    With this you force the tool to use specific plugin.

  • 0 in reply to Vipulc

    I think this helped me find a new lead. After opening a BRD file with the PCB Venture license, I went to "Tools -> Utilities -> ENV Variables..." and noticed the following line:

    set  gpu_canvas_renderer = nv_plugin_path

    Since the original pop up question was related to using the GPU to render the canvas, and the fact that this line does not exist in the PCB Designer license version, my assumption is that I should delete this line to solve me problem.

    Unfortunately, I don't know where this variable is stored. Going into my env file location (Local Drive\Cadence\SPB_17.4\share\pcb\text) yields no results. Where is the gpu_canvas_renderer variable stored, and how do I alter or delete it?

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