Windows technical information

HP Performance Tuning Framework (PTF) will guide your system setup allowing a "custom" configuration that best matches the workstation to CATIA V5 user requirements. This customization ensures availability of the latest graphics cards and drivers and removes some memory restraints.

The Framework is currently supported only on Hewlett-Packard's Personal Workstations running either Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Professional.

Please refer to www.hp.com/go/PTF for more details

Beginning with CATIA V5 Release 10 Service Pack 3 on Windows XP, a new maximum of 3GB user address space is supported. In other terms, models can get up to 1GB more of space in main memory.

Obviously it goes without saying that there must be physical memory to back this up. Thus it can make sense to have machines with up to 4GB of physical memory; 3GB for user app (CATIA V5), 1GB reserved for Windows XP operating system.

Please refer to accessing more than 2.0 GB of memory on Windows XP to get the directions to set it up.

• Please note the last paragraph about the /USERVA
  option.
  
  
• There is an additional Microsoft patch required above XP SP1 identified as #328269. Please refer to the Microsoft support page to get the patch.
  
  
• Support of the /3GB option with Microsoft Windows XP SP2 requires a Microsoft fix: KB890048 associated to the SRZ041014003627 case. This is part of the Dassault Systemes Global Release Notes web site.
  
  This patch is specific to Dassault, and as such is presently not published on the Microsoft site. It must be explicitly requested from Microsoft.
  
  The patch affects the use of VB script together with CATIA V5 on XPSP2 with /3GB enabled.

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Due to architectural reasons, not all of the physical memory will be available in systems equipped with 4096MB of RAM. This issue is not specific to HP workstations. Any current system capable of supporting 4GB of RAM will have the same issue.

To get better performance, many devices use Memory Mapped I/O (MMIO) to transfer data between system memory and the device. Typical devices are graphics adapters, network interface cards, SCSI cards, and IEEE 1394 devices. To use MMIO a device will reserve a block of memory addresses. These addresses reside near the top of the addressable memory space. The MMIO range required for storage and I/O devices is usually small; somewhere around 1MB each is typical, but it can be much larger for devices like caching RAID cards.

The MMIO address requirements of graphics adapters are also usually much higher. A workstation graphics card can require up to 256MB. In the future, this requirement may go even higher. This larger MMIO address requirement is needed to achieve the high performance required of workstation class graphics. (This is also true of high-end consumer/game graphics devices.) It is standard practice for a graphics device to reserve a MMIO area equivalent to the size of the frame buffer so that 1:1 memory accesses can be performed. Some current graphics adapters require twice the frame buffer. It is also common to see a few more MBs of address space reserved in addition to the frame buffer for other uses. The AGP aperture memory is also an MMIO region. The AGP aperture is configurable in the BIOS setup and is typically set to 64MB or 128MB.

Current systems have 32 address lines. This means that they can address 4,294,967,296 bits or 4GB. When 4GB of physical memory is installed, these reserved address ranges actually reside in physical memory, making that memory unavailable for the operating system.

There is an option in the Setup (Chipset) to disable/enable the memory mapping. However, keep in mind that Windows (32-bit) is not able to manage addressing above 4GB and then there is no guarantee that the system will run well if the feature is enabled (which means that addressing will be done above 4GB). This switch is much more dedicated to the operating system being able to play above 4GB (like Linux).