Shift PCB Design into top gear Summary - Altium

Summary
July 2006
Author: Rob Evans
In the workshop – Tip #4
Shift PCB Design into top gear
Find out how you can give your design productivity a boost with super-fast, fluid
graphics. By harnessing the power of Microsoft’s latest DirectX® technologies,
Altium Designer’s Hardware Accelerated Graphics Engine provides a
substantial increase in drawing speed over the standard graphics engine.
Ever wondered why PCB design editors – which are intrinsically graphical in nature – seem to ignore the enormous
graphics processing power available in modern PCs? Altium did! The latest service pack for its Altium Designer unified
electronic product development system moves PCB design into top gear by making full use of the latest Direct X® and
graphics accelerator technology to turbo charge the PCB design process.
With current high-density board-level designs placing significant demands on the real-time update capabilities of screen
graphics, zooming or panning around the editor screen often becomes sluggish and erratic as the graphics information
data paths saturate. To address this limitation, Altium Designer’s PCB editor now has an innovative new Hardware
Accelerated Graphics Engine.
The Hardware Accelerated Graphics Engine, introduced in Service Pack 3, provides a substantial increase in drawing
speed over the more traditional GDI-based (*Graphics Device Interface) graphics engines, and gives smooth, real-time
graphics updates within the PCB editor. The redraw speed is effectively instant, even on the largest PCBs.
The new graphics engine is built around the Shader Model 3.0 technology supported by Microsoft DirectX® 9.0c. Shader
modeling is a technique where the code for rendering the objects displayed by an application is executed by the
Graphics Processor Unit (GPU), instead of the main CPU.
Less data, more speed
Traditionally the graphics card is treated as a dumb pixel painter, where the application code first renders the image as a
bitmap in system memory and then passes all of the pixel data from the main CPU to the GPU. Conversely, when using
Shader modeling technology the rendering code is executed on the GPU itself. The application code simply issues
instructions to the GPU to render a particular type of object, supplying a minimal set of data such as object locations,
color, lighting, and so on.
In the case of Altium Designer’s PCB editor, this means that rather than passing a large number of pixels that, when
rendered, paint a track object on the screen, the GPU is programmed to know how to draw a track. Altium Designer
simply passes location coordinates, width and color information – a vastly reduced data stream compared with a
conventional GDI approach.
• Altium Designer’s new Hardware Accelerated Graphics Engine:
• Provides drawing speed improvements in the order of 20 times over GDI*.
• Removes the impact of polygons on drawing speed.
• Provides smooth panning and scrolling, at all zoom levels.
• Maintains drawing and panning performance for the largest of boards.
• Has been tested and benchmarked on a wide variety of graphics cards.
• Works in harmony with the existing graphics engine, allowing the user to switch between them as needed.
© 2006 Altium Limited Shift PCB Design into top gear.. Page 1 of 2

The Hardware Accelerated Graphics Engine capability can be enabled and disabled in the Preferences dialog under
PCB Editor > Display, using the DirectX checkbox.
See the Hardware Accelerated Graphics Engine in action >
Use the following links to learn more about Shader technology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shader
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winhec/partners/shadermodel30_NVIDIA.mspx
Note that the new graphics engine requires a graphics card that supports DirectX® 9.0c and Shader Model 3.0.
* The GDI is a standard Windows subsystem responsible for representing graphical objects then passing that raw
information to the screen.
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