Not Real Happy So Far????

[CraigB]

Not Real Happy So Far????

Well, I just recieved my 1st seat of Alibre Design Expert, installed everything, and I can't even begin making a part, because all I see is a brown screen with no planes or work area? And can't even draw a line? Well if it is, I can't see it. I'm running an AMD athlon 64 processor with 1 gig of Ram, and a quadro FX 3000 graphics card?... should be fine? Tried to contact support, and got the ol' leave your name and number and we'll call you back bit.... so far- looks like this was a very bad idea....

any suggestions?

Craig Bloxham?

 

[aa1]

This is a graphics problem. I will create a support incident on your behalf. Someone in support will contact you soon. Sorry for the inconvience.

 

[CraigB]

Well, I did get "some" help, in the form of an email stating I should download an exectutable file, this file was for older versions of drivers I was currently using..... this solved the problem with the Alibre display, regretably, now my monitor is unusable do to a contsant bright flickering.... this is not fun... not at alll.....

 

[jwknecht]

Craig,

Hang in there. I think your experience is untimely. You fall into a group of graphic card owners that experienced issues with AD 8.2. Unfortunetly for you, this is your first experience with Alibre (and 8.2 just came out). What a bummer. I think from this point on, you will find your experience from Alibre to be exceptional compared to other software companies. At least, that has been my experience... the customer support is the tops. Sounds like you have that problem that is mentioned in the other posts, where there is a NVIDIA driver fix to come out this month. Again, a bummer that you just purchased the software and you need to wait on the hardware fix before jumping in.

Let us know how you do.

PS: sounds like you could make some adjustments to your graphics settings to get you by in the meantime?

 

[scarr]

Re: Not Real Happy So Far???

Like John says, hang in there. Help is on the way. The folks at Alibre do take your situation seriously and once you're up and running you'll see why so many of us love this software and the company behind it.
Not to sound too stupid, did you download and install DirectX 9.0 before loading Alibre? have you tried playing with the refresh rates on the monitor, or tweaking the performance vs quality settings on the card? I get intermittent flickering on a Dell machine (2.8 Ghz, 2GB RAM) with a quadro card running Catia, but no problems at all running Alibre on an intel 2.4 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, maching with a Radeon 9600 graphics card. Stay with us Craig, you won't regret it. Alibre is a company unlike any you've dealt with before.

 

[CraigB]

Thank you all for you reassurance, !

Although it took me until 8 PM last night to finally work out the bugs, they seem to have been taken care of! Appears I intsalled a driver version that was a little too old. System restore/Safe Mode, Uninstalling, reinstalling, finding the right drivers..... took some time, so I hope to be ready to rock today!

THANKS

 

[sdalessi]

Alibre has some serious display issues. I to am a new user, my projects have been set back by weeks because of display issues. Have tries all the driver and graphics setting tricks suggested, no luck.

 

[swertel]

sdalessi:

What kind of problems? What is your hardware setup? OS? Version of DirectX? Video drivers? etc. etc. etc.

I understand the need to vent, but let's make it productive by defining a specific problem or at least the circumstances.

 

[gregmilliken]

Display Issues

sdalessi:

Hi, I apologize for the inconvenience you are experiencing with your display and it preventing you from being productive with Alibre Design.

As you probably know by now, with v8.2 we upgraded to support for DirectX 9. While this offers tremendous performance benefits it also has caused some problems with some older graphics cards and drivers. this was a calculated risk on our part but we felt the gains in performance and the dramatically lower cost of state of the art graphics cards justified the risk.

In extreme cases, it is possible that for a given card there is not a driver that supports DirectX 9, so there may not be a fix specifically for your device. It is possible a new graphic card is the only solution, although I hope that is not the case. In any event, we will work with you to try and resolve it, but I have followed the support dialog and it appears we have been engaging on this.

I am more than willing to speak to you directly and try to find a way to get you up and running. I believe our support team has passed on my direct line.

Again, I am sorry about the situation but I hope we can convince you this situation is due to the nature of rapidly changing technology rather than beign related to a lack of emphasis on quality or customer service.

Regards,
Greg Milliken
President and CEO
Alibre, Inc.

 

[sdalessi]

Thanks for the message Greg. We did speak, and after seeing the list of graphics cards that may work, I still have some serious questions about Alibre.

 

[scarr]

But still no indication of the platform, OS, graphics card, you're running. Why is that? We can't help if we don't have an understanding of the above. There's a big community of friendly users out here ready to help in any way we can, but the only thing we know is that you've got serious questions about Alibre. Having to upgrade equipment from time to time is simply a fact of life in this world of CAD applications. I've been running Alibre on a machine that's two years old with a medium priced graphics card (Radeon 9600), a gig of ram, a 2.4 MHz processor, windows XP Professional, without one bit of trouble, ever. It's one of the most stable applications I am running, more so than a few of the MS Office applications I use. You've got to help us before we can help you, otherwise all you're doing is whinning to no good end. I don't know what your conversation with Greg centered around, but I know how dedicated he is to the user base and their satisfaction, and for you to come back afterwards with the same sad lament is a little taxing for those of us who have worked with Alibre and know the people there. Sorry if this sounds un-sympathetic, but like I said you have to tell us what's going on before we can provide any assistance.

 

[gravity]

I'm curious why Alibre chose to use Direct X for graphics while all the other CAD vendors chose to use OpenGL. From information I've garnered, Direct X caters to the gaming market where fast, but imprecise displays are the norm and OpenGL caters to the higher end graphics needs (precise, but lacking the fluff that makes games look cool).