Autocad 2015 - Hardware acceleration unavailable issue @ Nvidia Quadro card

[Anonymous]

Greetings all,

I am having a difficulty here with ACAD2015.

Upon installation, I have had an old driver for my card

(Nvidia Quadro FX 580),

and hardware acceleration worked - it was turned on - and functioned supposedly fine.

I wanted to ensure performance quality so I went ahead and updated my driver to one of the latest currently, named 

332.76-quadro-tesla-grid-desktop-win8-win7-winvista-64bit-international-whql

Strangely, after installation, hardware acceleration didn't work anymore. here is the log entry:

Card name: NVIDIA Quadro FX 580
Driver version: 9.18.13.3276
Tuning Date: 23/04/2014
Virtual device: gdi12.hdi (Software)
The card and driver does not meet the minimum requirement.

Can anyone help with that?

(I wonder how come the older driver worked)

Regards,

Ishay

[pendean]

Newer isn't necessarily better: did you look to see if Autodesk has a driver for it?

[Anonymous]

indeed it appears they recommand an earlier one:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/syscert/card?siteID=123112&catID=18254205&id=18844534&product=1...

would you recommand its installation? could it, for instance, put me at a worse place with other applications like in Revit?

many thanks.

[braudpat]

Hello

Welcome to the Autodesk/AutoCAD Forums !

The Nvidia Quadro FX 580 is a very old card (about 2009) so the drivers can be or can't be compatible with 2015 !?

You have to try the latest driver or maybe the ante-last driver or maybe the recommended one by Autodesk ...

Have you tried with Hardware Graphic Acceleration disabled ?

[pendean]

Doesn't sound like you have many options my friend: was the earlier driver causing you issues with the other software?

[nestly2]

---

sich wrote:

I wanted to ensure performance quality so I went ahead and updated my driver to one of the latest currently, named 

332.76-quadro-tesla-grid-desktop-win8-win7-winvista-64bit-international-whql

Strangely, after installation, hardware acceleration didn't work anymore. here is the log entry:

Card name: NVIDIA Quadro FX 580
Driver version: 9.18.13.3276
Tuning Date: 23/04/2014
Virtual device: gdi12.hdi (Software)
The card and driver does not meet the minimum requirement.

---

---

sich wrote:

indeed it appears they recommand an earlier one:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/syscert/card?siteID=123112&catID=18254205&id=18844534&product=1...

would you recommand its installation? could it, for instance, put me at a worse place with other applications like in Revit?

many thanks.

---

Are you sure you're reading that right, the newest driver I see for your card is 9.18.13.3182 which is newer than the "new" one you tried.

Incidentally, I just had a similar experience.  After starting AutoCAD2015 for the first time, I promptly got a warning that my video hardware (Quadro4000) doesn't meet the minimum requirements... .after I picked myself up off the floor   I went into 3DConfig and it says my card meets recommendations and all the Effects are available and enabled, so I have no idea what that popup was all about. 

[Anonymous]

Welcome to the club, we have an entire office full of machines that no longer can use Hardware acceleration with any of the 2015 products. Revit, or Autocad both test and both do not have the option available. Autodesk tech support first said it was because our hardware was outdated, i then had to inform them that it doesnt work on old quadro card, new quadro cards, or brand new gtx 770 gaming cards....it just plain doesnt work. bunch of machines tested, same result on all of them.

The are currently trying to figure out the issue....so in the mean time we have project production issues.....thanks Autodesk, test your crap before you release it!!!!!

[braudpat]

Hello from France

Have you tried to disable the NVidia FXAA Anti-Aliasing Feature ?

Because some users report that with this NVidia FXAA feature disabled, they can sometimes run 2015 with Hardware Acceleration ON !?

[pendean]

Any drivers for you at their website (not everything is supported) http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/syscert?siteID=123112&id=18844534

Not using Quadro here but had to grab a supported driver to get it to work with hardware acceleration on.

[Anonymous]

I cant even turn Hardware acceleration ON its greyed out, FXAA is disabled, one of our quadro cards even crashes revit completly. Our brant new GTX 770 works neither. Autodesk has this all screwed up

[braudpat]

Hello

Even with LINESMOOTHING OFF and LINEFADING OFF ?

[nrz13]

scottofazphx:

Are your cards actually showing up under the "Hardware Setup" in the Graphics Performance dialog?  After upgrading to 2015, my card wasn't showing up there until I forced the BIOS to use the card (2014 and below automatically always found it, but 2015 did not).

[Anonymous]

no mine are not showing up, how would i force the bios to use them? the computer device manager and nvidia control panel shows them but graphics performances does not, see below

[nrz13]

The steps to change your BIOS settings will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer and from different BIOS versions.

The basic steps usually go something like:

1) Restart your computer and hold down F2, Delete, or whatever access key the BIOS needs (usually the very first screen that flashes when you start up your computer will tell you what this key is).

2) Once inside, look around for anything that looks like it would change your graphics settings.  What worked for me was to change my graphics settings from "Auto" to "Enable if no EXT PEG - Disable onboard GPU if GPU exists in the PEG slot".  Yours will almost certainly be labeled differently, but that's the gist of it.

3) Save the changes in your BIOS when it prompts you on exit and your computer will start up normally.

After Windows loads, AutoCAD should be able to see your card now.  However, it doesn't mean it will know what to do with it.  My 2015 performance is still pretty bad because AMD hasn't released updated drivers for 2015 yet (an AMD representative told me they are scheduled to be updated by the end of April, 2014).  It was still better than using the onboard graphics, though.

[JM_K]

Hello,

I do a bit of tech support for ADSK products and I have had a lot of people contacting me with this issue. There are 2 prongs to this problem and they all seem to relate back to the fact that the newer generation CPU's all come with on-board graphics. This was done by Intel to allow lower energy usage on laptops which was an admirable idea but seems to the root of a lot of these issues. The users that are reporting issues in 2015 Autodesk software all seem to have the same issue - their software cannot "see" the dedicated GPU (this affects AMD Firepros, Quadro and Geforce cards by the way) and if they have Autocad installed and they type 3Dconfig into the command line i would expect that it will show the Intel on-board graphics card not the dedicated card. 

This would seem to be easy to resolve except for a few road blocks that I have come across. Firslty, most manufacturers state in their manuals that the BIOS should allow the user to switch the graphics to "dynamic" mode which allows the switching to occur in Windows between the dedicated / on-board graphics. Despite installing the very latest BIOS update on a user's machine I was unable to get to this setting. This may not be an issue on all machines - it may be isolated to that manufacturer but be aware that if the BIOS is not set to "dynamic" or you cannot get access to the setting then you won't have any chance (from my experience) of proceeding in Windows to fix the issue.

Once you have the BIOS all lined up then we get to the next roadblock. Both the AMD and Nvidia website clearly state that in the respective control panels (CCC, Nvidia Control Panel) there is a setting to force all application to universally use the dedicated card. I have tried to get to this settings on user's PC that are running recent versions and the very latest versions on the video drivers and in all the unresolved cases, the section that controls this setting is missing.

My humble opinion is that there needs to be some collaboration between Intel, AMD, Nvidia and perhaps Autodesk to clear this up. Not being the the PC hardware industry I cannot claim to know how this might happen or who takes on the task but this would seem to be only way to resolve this. So to conclude, there is nothing wrong with your dedicated card (per se) but for some reason the software cannot use it.

Any thoughts?

[nrz13]

Autodesk is already working with AMD and NVIDIA and I know they're aware of the issue.  Somewhere floating around these forums is a beta NVIDIA driver that I believe is supposed to resolve the issue with AutoCAD seeing the correct graphics card.  But you're right in that some BIOS don't have a setting to disable the onboard graphics and there's not much those people can do at the moment that I'm aware of.

Autodesk added DirectX 11 support for AutoCAD 2015, and I guess that is the root of all the graphics issues people are experiencing in 2015.  2014 didn't have any problems using the correct video card for me.  It turns out my performance issues in 2015 are actually just bugs and not related to the graphics drivers.

[braudpat]

Hello

1) As I have already said, with my Notebook Dell Precision M4600 (Win 7 Pro x64 - 8 Gb Ram - QUADRO 1000M 2 Gb),

I have installed the latest NVidia driver (for example v3.33 - May 2014)

And test ... Of course with ACAD hardware graphic acceleration ON ...

---> Always some graphic strange "effects" ...

2) So I have disabled the "FXAA AntiAliasing Feature" of the NVidia driver for "ACAD.exe" program !

---> For me and my Dell Precision M4600 and its NVidia Quadro 1000M : it is THE Solution !

3) If always problem: wait for a NEW "special 2015" NVidia or ATI driver or wait (or use) for the SP 1 for 2015

You can test it - Please follow link to get the Beta-Test version ...

http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2014/05/beta-test-the-autocad-2015-service-pack.html?utm...

Which "must" address this problem !?

[JM_K]

Braudpat,

There are 2 issues at work here, each with a different cause and therefore with a different solution.

In your case you seem to have been able to get to the settings in the Nvidia control panel that allow you to set your Nvidia GPU to be the default GPU for Autodesk. You are then having issues with graphics that is a result of the Antialiasing settings.

The issue I was referring to in pmy previous post is one where the user cannot get access in the Nvidia control panel (or the AMD CCC) to set the dedicated GPU as the default which is very different. I would be interested to see if anyone who is having this second issue finds the Beta service pack resolves this issue as it would seem to be more an issue with the Nvidia / AMD driver packages. I tested this 2 days ago with a user and the very latest AMD driver bundle did NOT have the ability to adjust the system to use their dedicated FirePRO GPU as the default.

Perhaps the OP's can confirm which applies to their issue?

[Anonymous]

Hello again everybody,

Thank you for your input, as for now, the issue remains unresolved for me. With the recent drivers, including the current one (340.52, released in July) - acceleration is greyed out, but the correct graphic card name DOES appear correctly, as opposed to the situation described in your above discourse.

any ideas?

[diegoal]

Hello Sich,

I am having the same problem here. Did you solved it?

Thanks!