Image doesn’t show correctly in X-Ray visual style

[omar.ratp]

Hi

I inserted an image into my AC drawing. I’m doing a drawing in 3D starting from this image, using solids and regions. When the visual style is set to Realistic I can see the image but when I change to X-Ray all I can see is black and white points instead of the image.

See attached file

Funny thing is that yesterday it was working perfectly, meaning I could see the image in X-Ray mode, but today it doesn’t work! I don’t understand.

I have already made a new drawing, check with other images formats, and it doesn’t work

I'm using AC 2011

Help?

[Alfred.NESWADBA · Accepted solution]

Hi,

>> Funny thing is that yesterday it was working perfectly

So what has changed on your system since yesterday? Any updates installed (automatic Windows updating)?

And just to make sure: have you tried to restart AutoCAD (if that does not help then restart the whole system)?

Currently I have no AutoCAD 2011, but I have tried it with 2010 and with 2012 and both releases had no problem to display the image in XRay-visualstyle.

Can you try that with a new drawing or the same drawing but another image?

And just as an idea: what happens if you disable and then re-enable hardware acceleration (command _3DCONFIG ==> manual tune).

- alfred -

[omar.ratp]

Hi Alfred

Thank you for your anwser. It’s working now!

I went to disable/enable the Manual Tune in Adaptave Degradation and PerformanceTuning (_3dconfig) as you suggested. But to my surprise the Hardware Acceleration was disabled, I enabled it and now I can see the image perfectly in X-Ray visual style.

Funny, I don’t remember disabling it myself and no windows update since a while.

Regarding the image file, I did try with other images, even other formats (jpg, gif, etc…) and it wasn’t that. I tried making other drawing, restarted AutoCAD, restarted my computer, and the problem persisted.

It was then the hardware acceleration. What are the advantages/disadvantages of using hardware acceleration? And why did it turn off automatically? Maybe because the file was too big?

Thanks again

Omar

[Alfred.NESWADBA]

Hi,

Great to know you got it solved, thx for feedback!

>> What are the advantages/disadvantages of using hardware acceleration?

Hardware-acceleration activated means that the vectors (especially 3D objects) are transfered (like a display-list) to your graphic card and the GPU does then all the work like zoom/pan/shading/texturing/shadows/... and it can do that a lot faster then the CPU ... that's the advantage.

Having it disabled means that an AutoCAD-internal software module has to do all the calculation for the display, emulating shading, shadows and so on ... and as it is not specialized to any graphiccard it has to do that on the CPU and transfer then the calculated pixels to the graphiccard (not really down to every single pixel, but that's more easy to understand now).

That is for 3D-objects and visual styles other then "2D-Wireframe" not as fast as the graphic card itself can handle that.

And there are some options that aren't available for doing the emulation as the CPU is not fast enough (e.g. showing shadows in realtime), you also found one of those.

So now what's the advantage then to disable hw-acceleration when it's slower: you are not depending on any interfaceproblems and driverproblems. To transfer vectors/objects and shaders is quite more complex than to just transfer pixels, and as every vendeor of a graphiccard interprets specifications of an interface in another way than the one who sends the data to the interface (and DirectX is not easy if you want to support all functions described in the API) it might sometimes result in crashes or artifacts on the screen. Now, if you have problems with the graphiccard it's always a good option to disable the hw-acceleration as you might have a few functions less, but a working display.

>> And why did it turn off automatically?

Have not seen any case were AutoCAD or the operating systems turns off the hw-acceleration itself besides of the first start after installation of AutoCAD (when it does not recognize the options of the gc-driver).

- alfred -