Technical hints and tips

This page provides hints and tips to effectively counteract problems with the graphical display of the pCon.planner.

•	The pCon.planner may be limited in regard to the quality of display and processing speed if used with graphics hardware older than two years.

•	Make sure that the up-to-date graphics card driver is installed on your computer. If required ask your IT personnel or system administrator.

•	We recommend a color quality (desktop color depth) of 32 bit. If problems with the display arise, test whether a change to 16 bit solves the problem.

•	If you are using a notebook, we recommend using a stand-alone graphics card. Onboard graphics hardware is often less powerful.

•	Make sure your computer is suitable for the installation of pCon.planner. To do this, please refer to our suggested requirements and minimum requirements.

•	Install the up-to-date driver of your graphics card or inquire with your system administrator about the current driver status.

It is possible, that your system does not support all rendering modes of the pCon.planner. If this is the case, the note displayed below (Figure 1) will pop up each time you start the program. In the Render group (View tab), the unsupported rendering modes are replaced with the icon displayed below (Figure 2). Install an updated version of your graphics card driver or inquire with your system administrator about the current driver status. An update of the graphics card driver usually solves rendering mode problems.

Figure 1

Figure 2

•	The rendering modes of the pCon.planner differ in processing speed. With newer graphics cards, the Conceptual mode is usually fastest. In combination with older graphics cards, however, the Shaded mode is faster. Try the different modes to find out how each one of them works on your computer.

•	By default, synchronization of center and zoom of the orthographic views are deactivated (see "extended rendering options"). If these options are activated, the software needs more system resources. If not sufficiently available, the processing speed is slowed down.

•	If you are carrying out large plannings, or if your computer does not meet the suggested requirements, we recommend to not subdivide the workspace. Instead choose Single workspace on the View tab.

•	In combination with older graphics cards, the processing speed may be increased by decreasing the size of the user interface.

In ATI graphics cards, the “A.I.” setting is activated by default. This may lead to incorrect display of textures in the pCon.planner. Deactivate this setting to improve the display.

Modifying the refresh rate of your screen may increase the processing speed of three-dimensional views. Check which refresh rate setting suits best for your screen before you operate pCon.planner.