2011 hangs on hardware shade

[binstu]

I was working with a colleague the has recently install Alias 2011 on a MacBook Pro with a GeForce GT330. Whenever I would active hardware shade it would hang and it would have to be "force closed". I tested it with just a sphere and same problem. Diagnostic shading worked fine with accurate tessellation and at .01.

We also switched from battery save mode to always use the GeForce card (max mode). So it wasn't using the intel card that is on the motherboard.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Steve

[anand_joshi]

Geforce range of cards are not officially supported although alias may or may not work. Partial features may be supported depending upon many aspects.

Check hardware qual. charts for alias here - http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?siteID=123112&id=12581528

Hope this helps.

[Anonymous]

This is now happening on my PowerMac too (I have the NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 running AliasDesign 2010).  It may have happened after the recent Apple update to the graphics displays (meant to improve performance of some video games). 

All in all, Alias video performace is slower now even in wireframe mode that it was before (and I alway keep wireframe and shaded antialiasing off to prevent this type of slow down).  In general I would say that not supporting cards shipping on Macs as defaults will be a tremendous blow to this product on the Mac, and I'll likely be forced to dual boot again, which is always a bummer. 

For now we're resorting to a workflow of modeling in alias and doing quick visualizations in Rhino/VRay or hypershot (or whatever its called now), which both work fine even under emulation.  Would love to see an overhaul of Alias UI/Model drawing that would someday be free of all of these driver constraints.  I spent a year trying out driver revs on my previous Dell 7600, even though we put a $2500 Quadra card in it, now I get to try again with my PowerMac and have to stop using my MacBook pros, which will be a bummer, but are these cards also unsupported in Windows?

[anand_joshi]

Alias works best with Nvidia Quadro on certified drivers. Hope this helps.

[Anonymous]

Unfortuntaely this wont be an option for those buying MacBook Pros, IMacs, etc.  Currently even the 12-core PowerMac doesn't allow you to configure a machine with anything but an ATI card, but Apple does sell a Mac-certified quadro card for $1800 here: http://store.apple.com/us/product/TW386LL/A?mco=NjM0NTg4Mw

Would be nice to see an explanation of how Alias uses the graphics card in order to get a better understanding of why this is a problem that seems to have plagued Alias for such a long time, but we don't see as often with other software packages.

[anand_joshi]

I guess, ATI does not have a stable OpenGL driver for professional apps like alias.

Gaming is a different story !

So its not usage of specific graphics card features by an app but implementation of graphic card driver & I suppose Open GL driver.

[alehnhar]

I have this problem too and it seams to have happened after one of the OS updates.  However, if I open the Hardware shade option box and choose anything but the default light source, (Contrast, Warm/Cold etc..) it works fine.  

[huang.lichung]

Wow!

Thank you! Same problem has bothered me for a long time. 

And this work around really solves it. 

Autodesk should check this out and hopefully do something about it on the next version of Alias.

Rate it five stars if I can!

[Anonymous]

My machine has just started to do this also but theres no fix to get around it on mine. I will have to get another program just for visualisation it seems!