Improvements to Onshape - October 23, 2014

lougallo

The most recent build of Onshape was pushed this week with a number of improvements to visualization and performance.  Here are some highlights:
Highlights:

1. A new reference plane type has been added for curves and a point.  This is great for setting up sweep profile planes.
   
   
2. In Part Studios, suppressed and deleted selections in features show detailed feedback as of their status.
   
   
   
3. New view modes including wireframe and Hidden lines removed are now in the view options under the view cube.
   
   
4. Easily hide other elements of similar types (sketches, planes, parts etc..) in the context menu from either the graphics or List views.
   
   
5. In a Part Studio you can select which Parts are exported to STL.
   
   
6. Performance improvements to workspace creation, view rotation speed with selections\highlights, and Assembly tab switching. 
   

More improvements are in the hopper and we are iterating quickly to address your feedback. Thank you for the input and keep it coming!  ~Lou

mark_biasotti

Great list of improvements! - keep'em coming.

pete_yodis

I got to be honest.  I don't see much improvement to the view rotation.  Is it me?  I still think there is a lag in the view controls that needs to improve.  I imagine this may be related to the number of servers and location of servers, correct?  I'm in southeastern PA if it matters.

lougallo

@PDY the performance of view rotation with selections was the improvement.

pete_yodis

@LouGallo Thanks.

lougallo

Sorry about some of the speeds of the animations.  I know they are a bit fast.  I hope they work for this post and I will slow them down a tad and make the ending a bit more 

ilya_baran

@PDY In general, rotation performance is not related to server location, but rather your graphics card.  For instance, if you're on a laptop with two GPUs, you'll want to make sure the browser is using the faster one.

pete_yodis

@IlyaBaran Thanks for the insight into performance.  Is there a recommendation for graphics cards with Onshape?  I generally use workstation cards on the desktops I am using (NVidia quadro 570).  Are gaming cards better suited to the Onshape environment, or is still workstation graphics cards that are better suited - like with SolidWorks?

ilya_baran

@PDY After consulting with one of our graphics devs, for Onshape there shouldn't be any real advantage in using a Quadro card over a similar geForce.  The biggest danger is an Optimus setup on a laptop having the browser use the much slower integrated GPU -- and I believe that's the default in many Windows laptops.

pete_yodis

@IlyaBaran Does it just come down to raw graphics processing horsepower then?  If that's the case then something like a gaming card at a lower price level - but much higher processing power than a workstation card (for equivalent cost), sounds like the way to go for a system using Onshape.  This would be welcome news for folks looking to get better performance.  I was never a fan of the high priced workstation graphics cards - a necessary thing I suppose, but somewhat annoying when you see how much more horsepower there was in the gaming card realm for much less $$$.  I don't have to worry about the Optimus setup - at least not yet with my hardware.

ilya_baran

@PDY Yes, the cheaper gaming card with more horsepower should work better for Onshape.  At the very high end, more RAM is available in the Quadros, but that should only matter for very large models.

Ben_

'Very large' is an ambiguous statement. How large, in say part count?  I realize that is not a great reference due to complexity of individual models in the assembly, but it does give an idea....

To be honest I don't work in large assemblies much but I am curious at if there are some hard number metrics out there measuring when to get a Quadro card.

pete_yodis

@IlyaBaran Thanks for the reply and the information.  Lower priced higher performance gaming cards sound like a nice way to go to provide better performance.  For those of us still using Quadro cards, is there a certain driver that would be important for WebGL support?  What happens if webgl isn't supported by the driver/card - would performance suffer?

ilya_baran

@Ben "Very large" is deliberately ambiguous: besides part complexity, it depends on the specific implementation, tessellation quality, etc.  There may also be tradeoffs between rendering performance and memory consumed.  As we evolve our algorithms, the graphics memory usage etc. will change.

@PDY Simply having the latest driver is almost always a good idea.  If webGL is not supported, you'll know -- the browser will display an error message instead of our UI.

pete_yodis

@IlyaBaran  I currently am using a Quadro FX 570 with SolidWorks 2013.  The driver is 8.17.12.9573 from Feb 2012.  I would gladly use a newer driver to see if there is a difference - but it would bugger with my "certified" SolidWorks graphics driver.  Maybe I'll just try a newer driver and see what I can tell.  Think I would notice a difference?  If so, this could be a minor issue with users of systems like SolidWorks.

traveler_hauptman

@Ilyabaran Bonus points if you guys add info in the help section on how to make our browser use the fast card in an optimus setup (linux too please).

Wizard status if you guys can automagically detect I have an optimus setup and that I'm using the slow card (I might want to do this on purpose occasionally so don't 'fix' it for me, just warn me.)

jon_hirschtick

@traveler‌ excellent idea Traveler.  FYI for Mac users there is a utility called gfxCardStatus that lets you monitor and control which graphics card (in my case nVidia or Intel Integrated) is used.  Not sure about Windows or Linux.

ilya_baran

@PDY If you have a driver signed for SolidWorks and you're not seeing problems with OnShape, I personally wouldn't upgrade, but YMMV.

@traveler Yes, we should add the info at least for Windows -- the nvidia control panel.  I'll talk to the right people.  

For Linux, things are more complicated with Optimus: on my machine, I had to install Bumblebee and then invoke Chrome with --disable-gpu-sandbox, and even then I only got good performance with the latest Mint.  Linux systems vary enough that I wouldn't feel comfortable providing official instructions; certainly not something as gross as what I had to do.

traveler_hauptman

I found this link useful as a starting point http://alteredqualia.com/texts/optimus/
Perhaps a similar test for "Unmasked Renderer" could go in the help menu (or the appropriate sub-part. Help->About... perhaps).