Solid Edge on HP Personal Workstations

This document answers many of the common questions regarding configuring and running Solid Edge on HP Personal Workstations. It will be updated periodically as new information becomes available, or as information changes.

This document is maintained by The Hewlett-Packard Company. UGS does not necessarily endorse or guarantee this information.

Solution information

The current version of Solid Edge is Version 20 released early summer 2007. This document refers specifically to version 14 or later.

GRAPHICS DRIVERS

Graphics drivers have a dramatic impact on performance. The latest version is not necessarily the greatest.

HP supported drivers are available at the HP Support site.

GRAPHICS TUNING

If a system does not have the right driver, or the driver is not configured correctly, Solid Edge may not be using the graphics board in its hardware accelerated capacity when running the 3D driver.

1. Verify that you have a supported 3D graphics board and certified driver mentioned above.
2. Go to Control Panel, Display, Settings, Advanced, Troubleshooting, and verify that the troubleshooting slider is all the way to the right. When this slider is all the way to the left, it puts the driver in unaccelerated mode.
3. Configure the driver correctly confirming the application display mode is set correctly. Go the Control Panel, Display, Settings, Advanced, Graphics tab and for the OpenGL setting, pull down the applications and select Solid Edge.
4. Configure the application display mode to set it correctly. This is set from the Solid Edge GUI. Select Menu/Tools/Options/View Dialog/Application Display Mode. There are three settings. For high end graphics cards, it should be set for "graphics card mode".

Benchmarking Solid Edge

Solid Edge has performance tuning features to ensure all customers benefit from the speed of various performing graphics cards. This however can cause differences in behavior or performance when comparing for benchmarking. If you're doing benchmarks with Solid Edge and want to compare actual graphics performance, besides making sure you've correctly set the system up correctly as defined above, also do the following:

1. Make sure Solid Edge culling is turned off. This is set from the Solid Edge GUI. Select Menu/Tools/Options/View Dialog/Application Display Mode and check off culling.
2. Configure the shading display mode to be the same. This is set from the Solid Edge GUI. Select Menu/Tools/Options/View Dialog/Application Display Mode and confirm shading for reference planes are the same on both systems.