Performance Issues in AcadLT 2011 64bit on high spec workstation

[msemp]

Acadlt2011 was running terribly slow on 2 computers we have (32 and 64 bit) so I upgraded to a new higher spec workstation (Win7Prof 64bit, 8gb ram, Intel i7 CPU, Nvidia Quadro FX580 512MB GPU, 750GB SATA HD). The machine is completely new/clean and I have just installed Acad LT 2011 on it. It is still slow and unusable even when editing the most basic 2 line drawing. What is going on !£$(*&? Autodesk?

As there is no 3DConfig command in LT how do you leverage the power of the Quadro Graphics card to make things faster. NB. I cant use the Nvidia Quadro High Performance Autocad drivers as it does not recognise Autocad LT 2001. Is this because LT does not use OpenGL

Having spent hours trying to get LT to a point where it can be used I am now at a loss, and frankly pissed off. Autocad v14 on my old pentium ran faster on my old 80286 in 1994! I must be missing a trick somewhere......

I am quite an experienced IT specialist, recently come back to using AutoCad. I am open to any helpful suggestions. Maybe someone knows of a tweaking guide for LT 2011?

[iangowler]

Having a related problem.

We're using Intel 2.8GHz, 8gb Ram, Win 7 64bit, NVIDIA Qaudro Graphics, AutoCAD 2010 LT, Dual 19" iiyama monitors

Problem we are having is with cursor dragging and leaving trails with screen resolution at max 1280x1040 and refresh rate at 75hz.

Was going to trial a machine on 2011LT with the NVIDIA specific driver, but from what your saying that won't work?

And will also decrease performance!

Have you tried LT 2010 on that machine?

[pendean]

OpenGL is dead in Win7 I believe, search around these forums and review. LT has no 3D, so no 3Dconfig options exist.

There seem to be many unresolved issues with some nvidia cards and autodesk software since 2010 versions, no fix. Is yours one of them? Discussed heavily in the full AutocAD forums if you want to search.

Is WIn7 running in Aero Theme? Try Win7 classic theme.

Ribbon or AutoCAD Classic mode? Ribbon will tax a graphics card, Classic will not.

Do you have the Layer Palette open? Turn it off.

We are all still waiting on patch #1 for LT2011, it has not been released yet.

You just upgraded from R14? Nothing is that fast, R14 was a lightweight classic.

[msemp]

Update; Just had to fork out another couple of hundred pounds to pay for an annual vendor support contract. One of their specialists got back to me, remotely accessed the machine and checked my LT settings for 10minutes. He said that with LT 2011 there was no advantage to having a Quadro card as LT couldnt take advantage of it (false advertising from Autodesk). As there is no 3DConfig command in LT there is no way to tweak the driver within the application. He disabled a bunch of stuff (list to follow) and then told me that was all he could do. Unfortunately the application is still sluggish and suffers from cursor lag which make it frustrating to use. Considering the investment software and hardware I am very disappointed with Autodesk and I feel as if I have been blackmailed into paying for a far inferior product by the vendor. As it is not a pleasure to use I don't know if I can wait around for LT2011 service pack 1, if it comes. Nice going Autodesk. 

@iangowler

Havent tried LT 2010 on this machine (dont have it). I have been told by my support specialist that 2010 does run quicker than 2011, but 2011 is much more stable. Especially under windows 7.

@pendean

The Nvidia Quadro FX580 that I use is on the list of Autodesk certified cards for LT2011. I would not expect any of the above issues. I have seen performance improvements from pretty much every application I have now installed on the new machine except LT2011. The support specialist (see above) said that the graphics card was more than capable of handling the win7 aero interface and run LT. Removing Aero would give me a very very very  minor (i.e. unnoticeable) performance difference, as would using the LT Classic interface  with my hardware.

Any ideas anyone?

[iangowler]

I've now installed 2011 LT and haven't to much of a performance issue, i've got ribbon, properties, pallete and layer manager all open on one screen drawing on other.

Still got problem with the cursor drag.

Occassionally the task manager will show processor 2 being at max usuage and its slow then, but after few minutes it calms down again

So no help for the performance sorry

[tiagorcoelho]

Having the exact same problem. High spec machine: Nvidia Quadro FX on a 64-bit Vista with a Pentium QuadCore2, and AcadLT2011 running very slow at times (crosshair 'jumping' instead of smooth accurate movements).

I've followed this thread and changing the Vista theme worked just fine. With Vista Basic or XP Classic, LT works fine as it should. Also turned transparencies off. This was enough.

I agree this is a major flaw form Autodesk and is not expected to happen in such a piece of software. I'm still running a trial and am seriously considering not buying LT or any other Autodesk for the moment.

[marko]

Running on Autocad LT 2011 on AMD dual core 3ghz Nvidia 9600GT Windows XP 32bit. I have also been having the mouse crosshair lag issue. The problem has seemed random and not relating to drawing size at all - it can happen in a drawing with only a few simple blocks. Moving mouse over blocks will cause cursor lag big time even if selection preview isn't on. Turning off transparency seems to solve this for me.

[drjohn]

I had (and still have, on occasion) the cursor lag issue and changing between open drawings in the same session of ACAD can take up to 10 seconds so I installed Process Explorer to try to ferret out the culprit because it only happens in ACAD..

Imagine my surprise when I open ACAD, work for a while and nothing shows in Proc Explorer. So I open another drawing to cut from and paste to the current drawing and complete that task  and check Proc Explorer again and no change.

I work merrily along (with 3 drawing files open now) and the cursor starts to lag and jump.  I check process Explorer and notice that the Interrupt Handler has gone apesh*t and is taking 25% of the processor and won't let it go until I reboot. (Core i5, 4GB RAM, (cheap) Intel HD onboard graphics). Also checked the Intel graphics driver update site and I am up to date on drivers. Tried falling back to a previous driver with no change in the results.

I suspecct that the certified graphics is merely a payment to get on a list (they called it PAYOLA in the old radio days). But that's just me. Just sayin'

FWIW

[MartynCowley3208]

I also get cursor lag, especially with underlays, sometimes extreme. Closing AutoCAD (2011LT64bit) and restarting sometimes makes an improvement. But it is not encouraging when you have forked out a fair amount for a performance workstation and find it sluggish. (Core i7 2.93GHz, 6GB DDR3 memory, 640GB dual HD in mirror RAID, ATI Radeon 4850 512MB - chosen specifically because LT cannot make use of Quadro features, Win7 Ultimate 64bit).

[pendean]

There are posting tips, workarounds, variables to turn off and Win7 features to turn off, try them all while you wait for Autodesk: they work for most users having issues.

Start by turning off ROLLOVERTIPS, HPQUICKPREVIEW, QPMODE and SHOWLAYERUSAGE variable. Explore the other tips too.

[kengelle]

I have been struggling with this for days now and finally, FINALLY found a solution.  After trying all of the tips I've found in this forum and others I hit upon the one setting that mattered.  I changed my default color depth (Windows display settings) from 32-bit to 16-bit and I now get the smooth cursor movement I enjoyed on my older system.

I am running AutoCAD LT 2010 on a notebook PC with Core i5, 560M, 4GB RAM, ATI FirePro M5800 1GB, Windows 7 Pro 64-bit.  This was especially frustrating to solve as I just purchased this notebook  and have had it only since 1-3-2011 and was anticipating improvements in all areas over my previous, 4-year old notebook.  So I was crushed to see the cursor lag problems on the new system.  I fiddled with Dynamic Input, and on and on - disabled Aero glass, etc.  Nothing worked.  Looked at video drivers, mouse drivers, AutoCAD LT patches, yada yada.  Finally I was playing around with the Control Panel>Appearance and Personalization>Display>Screen Resolution settings and saw "Advanced Settings" and then "List All Modes" and the highest mode (the one I was using by default after setting the notebook up) was "1600 by 900, True Color (32 bit), 60 Hertz".  The next lowest setting was "1600 by 900, High Color (16 bit), 60 Hertz" which I chose, applied, and then tested in AutoCAD and !!!YES!!!.  It worked.  I have noticed that the 16 bit setting has changed the appearance of the Aero glass effects and, at this point, I really don't care.  As long as I know what gets the cursor right I can deal with it.

A good test of the cursor lag is to simply use the MEASUREGEOM command and run the cursor around while click-dragging.  It should be smooth as butter with no hesitations.  If it jerks, even momentarily, as if it is trying to snap to something then you can probably benefit from dumbing down your display's color depth.

I hope this helps some of you.  I was getting very depressed and now I am happy again.  Tomorrow I may get a little upset with Autodesk for not being better tuned in to this simple fix.  I haven't seen this tip anywhere in the posts I've read and it seems that they should be doing a better job at helpling users through some basic troubleshooting without all of the nutty "roll back your video driver" suggestions and the like.  I mean, we payed so serious money for the program, didn't we?

[pendean]

Thank you so much for the follow up, it will help others examine and try yet another option in Win7.

[nippur05]

I have the same issue and I discovered in the first minute that disabling AERO works better not perfect but better, but That's NOT the solution to decrease in any way the performance of an expensive PC and win7 just to make a BRAN NEW software to work, specially when using the OLD AUTOCAD 2010-2009 - 2008 ( no LT) worked perfectly.

So please some GURU form AUTODESK tell US, WHY in the ·$%&?"··$$%¿¿!! , can't  you enable 2D HARDWARE ACCELERATION on AUTOCAD LT 2011 or give me my money back.

[MendelsonGroup]

I am also having this problem although I only seem to be having it when I am drawing lines, all other operations are seemingly working well but since lines are the very basic fucntion of this program it is really unacceptable. 

I just upgraded to a Xenonn 2.76ghz  64bit win 7 machine with 6gb ddr3 ram and a Quardo FX580 from a Core2 1.8ghz win xp with 2gb ddr2 ram and quadro NVS 285.  My old machine ran 2008-2011 wonderfully, it may have taken longer to start up but once in CAD it worked great so having lag in this great new computer is so so dissapointing!

I ran the 1.1 update hoping it would fix things but no go.  The only thing that seemed to work was changing the bit depth to 16bit but that really is not a proper solution, my machine should be able to handle both.

Please Autodesk, fix this MAJOR issue.  Not being able to reliably draw a line is totally unacceptable.

[lsmiros]

Try turning off Selection Cycling. This fixed my issue immediately.

[drjohn]

I solved my laggy cursor issue by changing winboze 7  to Classic mode.

No more laggy cursor, however, the hardware interrupts continue and  I suspect it is my graphics card for sure cause it is the stupid Intel on-board graphics (HD Graphics as they call it). It grabs about 20% of the processor and remains there until a reboot.

FWIW

Regards,

DJ

[JimEvans6808]

Anyone able to install the 1.1 update for 2011 LT? I've got 3 dif spec machines and everytime I try and install the patch (either 32 or 64bit)I get a message saying 'it can't find a copy of Autodesk on my machine"!

On one machine I've actually got 2011, 2010 and 2009 (call me lazy for not removing but...)

Having the same issues of lag an multiple crashes/hangs with 3 differently high specced machines Quadro FX580 (like other posters in one machine) and after reading the Read Me was hopeful that the 1.1 patch would resolve many issues.. if only I could install

In desperation I tried the Hotfix too on one machine but it says only if your AClayer.dll reports a 115 version and then seems to contradict saying you cannot install it if it IS version 115!! Anyhow mine are 59?

Help anyone?

[tarapetter]

I had a jerky cursor in AutoCAD LT 2008, running on Parallels, and this worked for me!  I changed the monitor settings to 16 bit from 32 bit and it seems to have resolved the problem.