Formit won't start because of graphics card issues?

[Anonymous]

I get the error when trying to start Formit that its unable to start because of an out dated or incompatible graphics card. I have updated the card drivers and reinstalled Formit. The computer is an Alienware desktop, has 2 NVIDIA GTX 1080's. The settings in the NVIDIA control panel appear to be correct but the dialog window does not match the one in Autodesks Knowledgebase or even on NVIDIA's own website. There is no option to select the "High Performance NVIDIA Processor". Anyone have any useful suggestions? I'd really hate to waste all this horsepower simply because I can't find the correct settings anywhere.

[josh.goldstein]

Hi Shawn,

The "high performance graphics card" setting is probably for systems with a hybrid Intel/NVIDIA setup, where there's an integrated Intel chip that shares processing with the high-performance NVIDIA card. Not sure this applies to your system.

However, it's unclear why FormIt isn't working with your GTX 1080(s). We added the message you're seeing a while ago, to prevent FormIt from crashing on startup when the graphics driver was incompatible. But it's possible this message is giving you a false positive. 

Have you successfully run FormIt for Windows in the past?

It might be worth trying to clear the FormIt registry: 

• Navigate to Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\
• Delete the FormIt360 folder

This is a shot in the dark. We may have to follow up privately to coordinate a bit more and try some more advanced ideas.

[Anonymous]

I used FormIt successfully in THIS machine last week. As far as I know nothing has changed since then...at least until this morning when I updated the drivers and re-installed FormIt. I'll try your suggestions and see if that doesn't fix it. Otherwise I am at a total loss.

[Anonymous]

Your suggestion didn't work. How shall we get in contact?

[josh.goldstein]

We have a couple of additional suggestions, if you don't mind:

• Can you run this utility to see if OpenGL is properly configured on your machine?
• Can you try installing the OpenGL drivers from NVIDIA? 

[lucdoucet_msdl · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous / Shawn,

I'm currently using Formit 18.1 on a Windows system with 2 SLI linked GTX 1080 graphics cards on an Alienware Aurora R7 without your problem. Here's the configuration details from the NVIDIA control panel (sorry it's not english, but I'm Canadian so the apology is not an admission of fault 😉 Full details in the TXT file that is ZIPed.

And don't worry about wasting the horsepower, FormIt (as most all other CAD software) won't use the additional card in either SLI or non-SLI modes. It's mostly for games and I don't think even VR / realtime render engines use this proprietary NVDIA configuration.

I suppose you are not running FormIt 19.0 (which just came out yesterday!) as you say nothing changed since last week.

I've also attached the XML output of the OpenGL Extensions Viewer for @josh.goldstein Josh's benefit (also in the ZIP file).

Luc

P.S. I hope you aren't try to connect remotely to this PC with Windows remote desktop thru a VPN. That will be a problem.

[Anonymous]

@lucdoucet_msdl , funny, as soon as I ran the utility suggested by Josh and saw that the graphics driver wasn't on, I dug deeper and saw that there was a display adapter called "Remote Display Adapter" or something to that effect. Its not showing up now I think because I went to the office this morning and got the desktop to bring it home. Now hooked up at home that adapter is gone and FormIt was able to start up. This might also explain some issues I was having with another program which shall remain nameless. So the answer was that Formit (and other programs) will not work over VPN with Remote Desktop because it uses the Remote Display Adapter instead of the higher end NVIDIA cards in the computer. Hoping Autodesk or NVIDIA can figure out how to override that so we can work on these high horsepower machines remotely without having to tote them back and forth from the office.  Thanks for all the help guys. I think we're all good now.

[lucdoucet_msdl]

@Anonymous ,

I've looked into the problem with hardware acceleration over remote desktop and other solutions after switching from the Quadro Pro series of graphics cards to the GeForce series. With the previous Quadro card, the drivers "enabled" OpenGl acceleration over Windows Remote Desktop connections (RDP) which isn't the case in the GeForce drivers. Be that a technical or marketing constraint, I don't know. 

Here's a link to a 2014 version of Quadro drivers: https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/76507/en-us that touts a new feature! :

"New in Release 340.43: OpenGL hardware acceleration on Windows Remote Desktop"

The immediate solution was to connect using TeamViewer which was already implemented by our IT department and worked for several hardware accelerated design software but was not responsive enough to my taste.

With current social distancing practices, our IT department looked into alternative remote desktop solutions and started using Splashtop. I like it better than TeamViewer and it has settings that can be tweaked for performance, but the long term nature of the current situation defaulted to physically relocating the computer to within 18" of the operator (as you chose to do). 

Ciao,

luc