2019/2020 issues

[sharles]

Hey guys,

 

it's been a while. Last year we did a ton of customization in the stand alone tool library, new customized simulation models from our reseller, new posts, new tool build sheets from Jim Varco and we made the jump from X9 to 2019 to support all this. When 2020 came out, I did something I have NEVER done before, and automatically moved up, trying to stay current after all the customization work we put into things.

 

But in 2020 backplot is so bad when we put our massive, finish files on the screen, that mastercam completely chokes out, and I have to wait 10-15 seconds to get the system to respond. So the 2 of us (TerryH and I) who do the largest parts where we work, moved back down to 2019 because backplot is minimally better in that version. In the past X versions when backplot would choke out, I could simply mess with the  "Number of entities for dynamic rotation" setting in configuration and get things to work again. I tried briefly in 2019/2020 and couldn't seem to alleviate the problem at all.

 

Our reseller suggested we upgrade our computers, and last week I finally got a monster computer, but it had no effect at all on backplot. In fact, we had some outside contractors inhouse yesterday for network/server issues, and they took a look at things and said mastercam wasn't even accessing the GPU or anything else...Their opinion, and they have some familiarity with mastercam, is it's simply bad software code within mastercam.

 

Has anyone else experienced this and know of any workarounds?

 

The other thing is 2019 regularly will NOT produce any toolpath at all when we use Surface High Speed Scallop. Sometimes if I mess in the "Toolpath Control" page, and uncheck "include tool radius" I can get mastercam to calculate a toolpath, but other times nothing will work, and I will have to go back to Surface Finish Scallop

 

I'm not sure if they fixed it in 2020. I do know we got CNC Software to log a bug in shs scallop for the restpasses function because it was ignoring huge areas when we tried to pick parts with smaller tools, but I just haven't been in 2020 enough to know if they fixed the completely missing toolpaths we face in 2019.

 

Thanks,

Scott

[jwvt88]

My colleague had a similar issue after changing to new stand/sit desks. He isn't super computer saavy and plugged his monitors into the board instead of the GPU so he was using motherboard graphics. For him it was simple change plugs and restart, but you may need to disable onboard graphics in the bios or something. 

[Günther Massimo - GMCCS]

On 2/13/2020 at 9:17 PM, sharles said:

But in 2020 backplot is so bad when we put our massive, finish files on the screen, that mastercam completely chokes out, and I have to wait 10-15 seconds to get the system to respond. So the 2 of us (TerryH and I) who do the largest parts where we work, moved back down to 2019 because backplot is minimally better in that version. In the past X versions when backplot would choke out, I could simply mess with the  "Number of entities for dynamic rotation" setting in configuration and get things to work again. I tried briefly in 2019/2020 and couldn't seem to alleviate the problem at all.

In 2021 PB1 backplot is much faster again. Hopefully they will provide an update for 2020. It's a pain in 2020. I do understand if a customer moves back to 2019.

 

[SSS824]

On 2/13/2020 at 3:17 PM, sharles said:

Hey guys,

 

it's been a while. Last year we did a ton of customization in the stand alone tool library, new customized simulation models from our reseller, new posts, new tool build sheets from Jim Varco and we made the jump from X9 to 2019 to support all this. When 2020 came out, I did something I have NEVER done before, and automatically moved up, trying to stay current after all the customization work we put into things.

 

But in 2020 backplot is so bad when we put our massive, finish files on the screen, that mastercam completely chokes out, and I have to wait 10-15 seconds to get the system to respond. So the 2 of us (TerryH and I) who do the largest parts where we work, moved back down to 2019 because backplot is minimally better in that version. In the past X versions when backplot would choke out, I could simply mess with the  "Number of entities for dynamic rotation" setting in configuration and get things to work again. I tried briefly in 2019/2020 and couldn't seem to alleviate the problem at all.

 

Our reseller suggested we upgrade our computers, and last week I finally got a monster computer, but it had no effect at all on backplot. In fact, we had some outside contractors inhouse yesterday for network/server issues, and they took a look at things and said mastercam wasn't even accessing the GPU or anything else...Their opinion, and they have some familiarity with mastercam, is it's simply bad software code within mastercam.

 

Has anyone else experienced this and know of any workarounds?

 

The other thing is 2019 regularly will NOT produce any toolpath at all when we use Surface High Speed Scallop. Sometimes if I mess in the "Toolpath Control" page, and uncheck "include tool radius" I can get mastercam to calculate a toolpath, but other times nothing will work, and I will have to go back to Surface Finish Scallop

 

I'm not sure if they fixed it in 2020. I do know we got CNC Software to log a bug in shs scallop for the restpasses function because it was ignoring huge areas when we tried to pick parts with smaller tools, but I just haven't been in 2020 enough to know if they fixed the completely missing toolpaths we face in 2019.

 

Thanks,

Scott

I build our computers and I can tell you that Mastercam just doesn't utilize the GPU or CPU, it is often only 10-15% uitilized.  Compare that with gaming or rendering which use 100% of both at times.  Solidworks utilizes much better but still not 100%.  It is something they really need to work on, the quadro cards vs gaming cards make no difference. 

I put a GTX 1080 head to head with an M4000, enabling both in the nvidia control panel etc and set to use max power etc. multithreading enabled in Mastercam etc.  It simply doesn't matter.  One area that does make a difference is the clock speed of your cpu, running 5Ghz definitely calculates toolpaths faster then 3Ghz.

So for Mastercam an expensive gpu doesn't really matter, but a i9 9900k is the best CPU for performance due to single threaded utilization of Mcam.