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Plan3D: Optimize 3D Performance - Hints and Help
 


Optimize 3D Performance

Improve Editing Speed

Rendering 3D images puts a huge demand on computer processing. The more 3D furniture, walls, reflections, and shadows your computer has to draw the longer the response time. Here are solutions to this problem...




Turn Off Lights and Reflections

Improve editing speed by 5-10 times by pressing the L or M keys to turn off lights and reflections/mirrors. Their status is shown on the toolbar next to L and M (green on/red off.)

  • With lights on, surface brightness and shadows must be rendered which takes 3 times longer to process.
  • Reflective surfaces and mirrors need to be calculated by angle in 3D. This alone can require 5 to 10 times the processing time than non-reflective surfaces. Turn this off for much faster editing!

Update Your Video Card

Your video card accelerates both 2D and 3D graphics on your screen. If your computer doesn't have the latest driver - or even worse no driver - Windows substitutes its generic driver - which means your video card is running without acceleration.

If your video card's driver is out of date update it now! It's free, not complicated to do, and improvement in performance will make you happy.

Old Computer?

If your computer is older than seven or eight years, chances are performance is going to be disappointing no matter what you do. The latest computers and video cards can render 3D images 20x-50x faster than computers from back then.

Memory Makes a Big Difference

A computer with 8GB is going to run MUCH FASTER than a computer with 1GB. Why? Because the computer won't need to move program processes to and from the the hard drive when it runs out of memory - taking 100 times longer than writing to memory directly.

Memory costs about $10 per gigabyte currently. But before you rush to buy some, here's some other ways to allocate more memory to plan3D:

  1. CLOSE OTHER PROGRAMS
    This frees up the amount of memory available to plan3D.
  2. TURN OFF BACKGROUND TASKS
    Such as virus scans, disk defragmenting, etc.

Windows Up to Date?

The latest video card drivers are fine-tuned to work with the latest versions of Windows. If Windows isn't set for "Automatic Updates" go here to update it now www.windowsupdate.com.

Set Laptop For Performance - Not Battery Conservation!

Laptops often come from the factory set to run slower to conserve the battery. Two solutions:

1. Sometimes just plugging in your laptop doubles or quadruples video card and processor time. However, you can configure your laptop to not do this using Window's Power Settings (see next solution.)

2. Unfortunately, some laptops have Power Settings set to "SLOW" even when they're plugged in! It is easy to change.

CONFIGURE LAPTOP FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE
(how to turn off battery conservation mode)

1. Open Start menu>Control Panel

2. Open "Performance Information and Tools"
(or "Maintenance" if you have Windows XP)

3. On left click "ADJUST POWER SETTINGS"

4. Click button next to "HIGH PERFORMANCE" or set the performance to maximum and power savings to nothing.

Turn Off Anti-Aliasing

If you have a state-of-the-art, screaming fast video card you probably wouldn't be reading this.

So, if your video card isn't running in the top ten, 3D graphics will run much faster if you turn off anti-aliasing (Start menu>Control Panel>Display>Settings >Advanced). Setting anti-aliasing to "Application Controlled" will speed things up significantly.

Note: To manually do anti-aliasing in plan3D - to smooth out the jagged edges in the view - press the S key.

 

   
 


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