ATI Radeaon Mobility 9800 Video Card

[bstall]

Is anybody running Mastercam with an ATI Radeon card? I can not see my zoom or delete window in the graphic background screen. I was wondering if anyone knows how to fix this or a driver version that will take care of this. I am using a new Dell XPS laptop and ATI was the only options I had to choose from.

[Richard Thomas - Mastercam UK]

I sorry to say this bstall, but ATI graphics do not work very well with Mastercam, and have not done for as long as I can remember (over six years). If you search the Forum for the term "ATI" you will find a PLETHORA of information and sad frustrated Mastercam users. That is, until they changed from ATI (generally, to Nvidia cards).

 

If you can't change the graphics, you may have to change the laptop. In the meantime, you can try switching off Mastercams' Open GL graphics (Screen/Configure/Screen, and "disable Open GL") and/or slow down the Hardware Acceleration through the Control Panel (Display page) of your oerating system.

[Dennis at CAD/CAM Consulting]

My ProStar laptop has the ATI Mobility Radeon 9700. If I have the accelleration control all of the way up, Mastercam won't even start. Crashes before it opens. Set the acceleration control down to the point it shuts off the Directdraw and DirectX accelerations. In most situations that has solved the problem.

 

[ 10-08-2004, 08:39 PM: Message edited by: Dennis at CAD/CAM Consulting ]

[Jack Mitchell]

I also have the XPS Extreme mobile with an ATI graphics solution. I cannot understand why these problems still exist. You need to cut the hardware acceleration to the minimal setting in order to have a smooth enjoyable experience. Inventor and Solidworks seem to work well whether at minimal or maximum hardware acceleration but Mastercam doesn’t – in fact the only program that I use that requires this step is Mastercam.

 

I’m going out on a limb here but I might suggest that the mousing operation within Mastercam might be written in some archaic spaghetti code that constantly polls the mouse video function thereby bouncing or fluctuating between both shared devices – this leaves me the choice of: - do I disable the mouse or do I disable the advanced features of the graphics card?

 

Why this happens with ATI and not with Nvidia is very curious but I will still likely buy or lease another of these Dell XPS mobiles with the ATI video around December which will bring my own personal investment up to about 17K in the past two years. These hardware issues are not valid IMHO but related to a software handling issue that is unique to Mastercam since I have yet to encounter another current program that craps out like this.

 

I am curious as to what approach CNC Solutions is going to use with Mastercam “X” or whether it will be an actual concern at all. Is the new interface based on a more current engine or is it still perhaps written in Pascal or FORTRAN?

 

I am not being smart about this I am merely posing the question that begs to be asked. Perhaps one of the Beta testers could shine a little impartial light on this subject without the “ATI sucks routine”.

 

 

Regards, Jack

[Bullines]

ATI doesn't suck. Quite the contrary, actually, since in the high-end commercial market, ATI caught nVIDIA napping and surpassed them in terms of price/performance. And you gotta love them Canadian companies (even Matrox...hopefully they'll come back to the 3D market in a big way) Ignoring Mastercam for a moment, nVIDIA is the one who sucks and is playing catch-up.

 

But in the case of Mastercam V9.x and previous, I have my ideas (knowing the "tendencies" of ATI and nVIDIA hardware, having a small amount of OpenGL programming experience and without being privy to the Mastercam source) as to why this occurs and they're not something that needs to be discussed on a public forum. I haven't done any testing on X with Radeon's or FireGL's yet, but I'm quite confident that the ATI experience with X will be comparible to the nVIDIA experience.

 

But until X goes gold, these have been my recommendations (which also apply to notebooks) and will continue to be until I see evidence to change it.

[Thad]

quote:

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CNC Solutions

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You mean CNC Software.

 

Thad teh critical