Nvidia FX5200

[Tinny]

Hi Guys,

I am having trouble verifying a part within mastercam Trusolids, it crashes or does not complete the toolpath even though the percentage runs to 100%. I have got onto the guys at 4D Engineering my MC resellers and they can verify no problem at all with my file. I am left wondering if it is the Nvidia card. All the other PC's in the office are similar spec and give the same results.

 

Any advice??

 

PC is Pentium 4 3Ghz, 1Gb RAM,Nvidia FX5200 Latest drivers installed.

 

Many Thanks

 

Rob

[Bullines]

The FX5200 is the bottom-end of the GeForceFX line. It's equivalent to the MX cards in the GeForce2 and GeForce4 line. A Quadro FX is recommended but if that's out of the question, try the FX 5700 or 5900, instead.

[GreggT]

You might try a softquadro on one of your cards and see if the problem goes away. www.guru3d.com I have this applied to a Ti4200 and it really improves the reliability and performance for adesk Inventor. Not sure it will help you but definately worth a try before you spend money on an FX or Quadro card.

 

Good luck

[Teh Bear without Brains kinda idiot]

Tinny .

You better before doing anything else tweak Opengl settings for your display driver such as disable support for advanced cpu instruction set and enable conformant OpenGl texture clamp behavior and vertical sync try off by default

 

HTH

rr

[d00d]

Not to hijack but anyone familiar with the FX5950? I have this card and is giving me lots of trouble. Bulliness? any suggestions?

[Bullines]

What kind of troubles? Who manufactured the card? Which driver are you using?

[d00d]

Bulliness, under advanced settings, reads as follows...NVIDIA GeForce FX5950 Ultra (Gateway)

Troubles are Typical Video card type screen traces, crashes etc.... Leads me to believe it may be a driver issue, any suggestions on drivers? how do I know if they are the most current?

[Tinny]

Hi Guys,

If I reduce the quality to halfway, the problem dissappears, so guess it is hitting a limit somewhere. Support at 4D was able to reproduce the same problem on thier PC's (they had run the file with quality halfway and reported no problem) and suggested it was the size of my file, it was rather big through necessity.

 

Many thanks for the help

 

Tinny

[Bullines]

d00d, can I guess that you have a Gateway computer? You seem to be using Gateway drivers. In my experience, nVIDIA drivers from OEMs (Dell, Gateway, etc) tend to be far behind the actual reference drivers from nVIDIA. I recommend this (Pooh will recommend something similar but a bit different, I'm sure ):

 

1. Download nVIDIA's latest Forceware drivers for Windows 2000/XP and save them somewhere on your computer.

2. In the Control Panel's Add/Remove Programs applet, uninstall your video drivers.

3. Reboot into Safe Mode. If you're prompted to set up any newly found hardware (most likely a video adapter), cancel it.

4. Disable your antivirus software if it's running.

5. Run the installation of the drivers that you downloaded.

6. Reboot into Windows normally.

 

When you're back in Windows, make sure the drivers "took" by going to your Display Properties, clicking on the Settings tab, click the Advanced button, click the GeForceFX 5950 tab, and make sure all of the filenames listed have the version number 6.14.10.6177.

 

If that solves the problem, cool. If not, there's other things we can try. But having the latest drivers from nVIDIA is a good starting point.

 

Tinny, does your problem go away if you have the acceleration at full but disable OpenGL in Mastercam?

[Tinny]

Bullines,

yes, turning OpenGl off has cured my problem. I am now able to run top quality STL files with no problem.

 

Thank you very much

 

Tinny

[d00d]

Followed your instructions Bulliness But still not up to par for what this puter is but I think it helped some.any other"hot rodding" tips you can offer? BTW where do you turn off open GL within MC?

[d00d]

Just a little system info if it will help

 

Windows XP home

3.2 GH processor (pentium)

1 gig of ram

riduculously large HD

any other info that will help? Other than Credit card #?

[Bullines]

d00d,

 

To turn off OpenGL in Mastercam, go Screen | Configure, then click on the Screen tab. Uncheck the "Enable OpenGL® Drawing" checkbox.

 

Before we continue, are your version numbers for your driver files ok?

 

No need for credit card #; I accept PayPal j/k

[G Caputo]

Bulliness,

Quick question: If the "Enable OpenGL® Drawing" is checked but grayed out what does that mean? I am trying to follow along on this one.

[Bullines]

quote:

---

Bulliness,

Quick question: If the "Enable OpenGL® Drawing" is checked but grayed out what does that mean? I am trying to follow along on this one.

---

You probably have shading enabled at the moment. Disable it and then the OpenGL checkbox should be enabled (not grayed out).

[G Caputo]

Thanks Bulliness, will be watching to see where this thread goes to keep learning and learning.

[d00d]

OK better driver GL disabled now we are starting to behave like a Pent. 3.2 gig. one more question our other seat is on a PC with a NVIDIA 5600 XT I think this was a PCI slot card (not sure) will these updated drivers work with this card as well? Oh and of course any other hints such as this beyond what you've suggested would be greatly appreciated as well. These questions come up soooo much about tweaks and settings mayhaps we should have a tweak post locked to the top next to FAQ that can be added to? Just a thought, doing a search on video card settings etc...brings up waaaaay to many hits for me to sort through with my attention span Huge Thanks Bulliness

[Bullines]

XT to the GeForceFX is line MX to the GeForce2/4. XT came after the GeForce5200 was released. It shouldn't be a PCI card, though; should be AGP. The drivers will work with that card, but I'm not too sure performance-wise how it compares to the 5200.

 

A few tweaks you can try regard vsync. This determines whether your video card will synchronize buffering swaps with your monitor's refresh rate or not. When vsycn is disabled, your card will swap more often (faster). Sometimes this improves performance and sometimes this causes visual problems (artifacts, tearing, etc). To try this, you need to enable the CoolBits tweak. Go to HKLMSOFTWARENVIDIA CorporationGlobalNVTweak and create a new DWORD value called CoolBits. Set it to a decimal value of 3. Then in your Display Properties, Settings button, GeForce tab, you should see more options. Avoid the section called "Clock Frequencies" for now; bad things (read: expensive things) can happen. In the "OpenGL" section, try setting vsync to "Off by default". Do the same to DirectX (you'll have to click on the Direct 3D... button.