Terrible menu / button behavior - Windows, April 2018 update

[Anonymous]

Hi, I'd like to report strange behavior. I'll just describe it.

My machine is: Dell XPS 15 laptop, up to date windows 10, which means April 2018, and all most recent drivers both on on-processor graphics and Nvidia GPU. 16GB DRAM, and your recent "works better on April update" fixes. The machine is very fast generally, and I have the fastest disk available.

I recently had to do work in someone else's project, and it's a huge project file. I imported as STEM, but it's almost 1GB in file size. It does seem to rotate and move OK. The issue is not model complexity, because I've reproduced these effects with your Recip Saw example, which was working great when I started learning Fusion a few months back, before the April 2018 update.

The weird behavior is menus. An example comes when I try to export a component as STL. The sub-menu comes up, but the menu items ( like the fine-ness of triangularization ) don't render properly, and I can sometimes change the menu item once, not again.

Even worse, the component drop-downs simply don't work. I click on the little triangle, and nothing happens. This makes Fusion functionally impossible to use.

I do get a warning from Fusion 360 that "performance is not very good" and ideas to fix them. Most of those involve buying new hardware, which would mean a desktop machine and clearly isn't the real problem, because before April 2018 everything was superb.  Even one of my test models, which has literally three components ( there was a "tank" example), the main menu items don't open.

I have tried a few things - like running on the GPU vs on CPU graphics. I've tried running at lower screen resolution. I've tried tweaking the GPU render parameters ( in favor of speed ). I found some critical buttons, like unclicking the "render mesh preview" button in STL. My other smaller models and your example models don't work either, so unless I'm doing something very wrong ( clicking on the wrong mouse button, since I'm a n00b, but I tried all the mouse buttons and all the modifiers ).

I blame the April update, but I'm not quite ready to roll back yet. Let me know if there's anything nominal I can do to help debug.

Regards --

Thanks,

[ryan.bales]

Honestly this does sound graphical in nature. At a very basic level, have you tested reinstalling Fusion?

I have quite a few questions to narrow this down

When you install graphics drivers, do you do this from Nvidida's website? Do you clean uninstall the previous drivers?

What model of GPU is it? 

When did you install the Windows April Update?

[Anonymous]

Reinstall Fusion?

Sigh, sure, can do....

When did you install the April update?

Uh, April? I got it right when it came out.... which as I remember might
have been the last day in March. I've also taken your most recent Fusion
update that worked around some of the found issues. And I took the
Windows update last week. Really, the system is absolutely as up to date
as it can be ( likely to my peril ).

What is the graphics card version?

The Dell XPS 15 is a 9560, I should have included that, there are many
XPS 15 sub-models.
The two chips are the Intel 630, and the Nvidia GTX 1050.

Where do you get your drivers?

I get my Intel drivers from Intel's site, which is often a bit a head of
Dell's. I am currently on 24.20.100.6136.

I get my Nvidia drivers from Nvidia's auto-update, which is "Geforce
experience". The current version is 398.36.

I am fairly certain the exact same problem happens regardless of which
graphics adapter I am running. I go into the NVidia Control Panel and
set the graphics card differently either for Intel or NVidia, I validate
which card I'm running on with the GeForce taskbar icon which clearly
shows whether a given app is on Geforce or not, then I go into Fusion (
after restarting and validating it's on the right card ), and observe
the behavior.

I had also thought it was a driver peculiarity, which is why I tried to
run on both chips. I would be happy to take a performance hit, as long
as I can manipulate objects.

Do I "clean update" my drivers?

No, I don't. I generally find that, in 2018, the driver guys know how to
install and update.... and I can't really clean update anyway, because
the driver will auto-install from the Windows repository on reboot,
which is always behind what's on the websites. The other path is remove,
reboot, get from the windows repository, use the manufacturer's
repository to update. Hassle. The Intel driver is more complicated
because I am using the Intel package not the Dell package, so I have to
use the driver update against the zip file.

In any case, the fact that I get the same exact behavior regardless of
graphics card seems to narrow down that, yeah? I have spent quite a few
too many hours messing with drivers on this project.

Thanks for looking into this. I will let you know how the fusion
reinstall goes.

[Anonymous]

I have created a small video to show the problem. I don't have to go into the STL directory.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qs0ke06XUcw7Qtk7PblJ8uIKKuuhW-Ce/view?usp=sharing

This video shows a very simple model, the fact that I don't really have performance problems, then I can't navigate the model.

What's super interesting about this video is _it didn't record the model browser!

So you can't actually see what's going on....

but the reality is you appear to have implemented two different windows, and there is something newly messed up about the two windows. They are out of sync, or one is not accepting input correctly. Sometimes a given browse option works, but sometimes it doesn't.

Help, help.

I answered all your questions about versions, drivers, and whatnot

I can't show you a screen video of both windows, because Windows 10 no longer allows that, every tool has permission problems doing that.

[ryan.bales]

Did you test the reinstall?

Nvidia includes the clean reinstall to alleviate issues found in Windows and its a good plan to use it when doing manual installs of drivers. Honestly i would not let Microsoft determine what graphics drivers i need.

There are many possible causes and if you've not reinstalled since the 1803 windows update its highly likely there are compound issues going on and a clean reinstall is the best:

How to do an automatic clean uninstall for Autodesk Fusion 360

[Anonymous]

Thanks, here are some details.

I reinstalled, but not using the "cleaner" as you propose. Let me try that. A just simple reinstall using the standard windows uninstall yielded no difference in behavior.

I have gone back and forth with multiple drivers. I have used the latest Intel. I have used the latest NVidia. I have gone back to the Intel that Dell has recommended. With NVidia there is a new driver every few weeks, I can't try some binary search across 50 versions ( I think the chip has been used in builds for 2 years ). Intel updates this driver about once every two months so the search space is smaller but I've tried two versions with no difference in behavior. If you have a specific driver number to recommend I'd like to hear about it.

Again, the fact that _both drivers_ have the same effect, which started after the April update, seems that talking about the changes in the April update is more interesting.

I will try the "clean reinstall" of Fusion right now and see what happens.

[ryan.bales]

Its not something we've seen before and the update is a few months old with many users on it. So it comes down to program interference and graphics. I tend to lean to the later but its possible you have a program that is virtualizing a graphics card/driver and that is part of the issue.  

I don't have a specific driver - only that when installing nvidia has an option to remove all old drivers. 

[Anonymous]

Fusion reinstall with your "clean" tool. No joy, same behavior.

When I look carefully, for example in selecting in the browser, I find there are very specific spots I can click. It looks like it's about 0.2mm off to the right, from where the active location should be.

[Anonymous]

Sounds like we're stuck. At least I've reported the issue.

My software install is fairly vanilla for a developer of things. I do have VM-x enabled to use WSL, I do have VMWare Workstation installed, I have a fair amount of the Adobe suite installed for video and audio editing, but nothing terribly esoteric.

I have noticed a similar recent graphics / interaction based problem in another program, so you might be right and it's not a fusion problem. In VMware, in some text editing operations, the screen simply doesn't refresh. That's a very different environment, but it is a related symptom. I might even end up trying to uninstall VMware, check fusion's behavior. VMware gets its hooks in deep.

It turns out I can't roll back, I may have deleted the roll-back point after I was running it for a few weeks with no obvious problems. I doubt I'm going to do a clean re-install based on this --- I might though, especially if other programs show error.

[Anonymous]

I believe I have found the problem!

The problem relates to high DPI screens. Maybe it is related to the April 2018 update, maybe not.

If, on a High DPI screen, I have enabled the Settings -> Display -> "Scale and Layout" scale factor, and set the value to something other than 100%, the Fusion UI becomes unusable.

On most of my screens, I have values set that are either 175% or 125%.

On those screens, hovering over the arrows in the "browser" of Fusion360 means that most arrows don't light up. The dialog box in Save STL doesn't work right.

Yet, if I reset the display to 100% the UI works correctly.

Hopefully, with this clue, you can reproduce the problem and identify a fix.

( Again, this is running on the NVidia card in my laptop, GTX 1050; all the latest of everything --- including this week's NVidia driver ).

This doesn't require a reboot or anything.... just running at %175 means the clicks and mouse actions don't match up with the placement of the pixels, and the UI doesn't work.

Good

[ryan.bales]

You might be able to get this working by launching Fusion under certain conditions. Particularly this:

[Anonymous]

Fusion is unusable on a 15" 4K screen without scaling.... you ( that is, me 🙂 can't see anything. It does, however, function in terms of working as a UI. It's pretty bad on a 28" 4K monitor. One of the most popular laptops, especially for high-end workstation use, it my Dell XPS 15, which has come stock for a few years with a 4K display. I recommend Autodesk buys one for a developer :-).

The work-around is to plug into a low-DPI monitor, and turn off the scaling across the board.

Or to set my overall display resolution to something small ( like 1920x1200 on a 15" ) then turn off scaling. Then I can make progress. Having even 125% scaling means most menu buttons don't work, and it means all my other applications and screen settings are messed up, and I have to go back and change everything when I leave whatever task I'm doing in Fusion.

The problem is some kind of offset between the two window panes in your application, and I look forward to a patch.

[Anonymous]

Any update? Have you reproduced it? It is 100% of the time related to turning on scaling.

My work around is turning off scaling and bumping my display res down, and/or attaching to a low-dpi screen. Pretty mad work around.

[ryan.bales]

I don't have a 4k monitor but there are well known issues with 4K. 

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/fusion-360/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Adj...

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/fusion-360/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Per...

[Anonymous]

Both of those links are not available to me.

This is a clear bug in the product which does not require a 4K display, but comes up on any display if you use Windows scaling. "Turning off windows scaling" is not a reasonable response - fixing Fusion is the reasonable response. The mouse clicks simply don't match the drawn regions on the screen.

Is this a bug Autodesk acknoledges, and is there a fix in the works?

[ryan.bales]

That is strange they are dead, and for me too. I copied them directly, let me try again. 

Windows 10 Display settings