Assigning external graphics card

How to solve presentation and performance problems in pCon.planner

1 Introduction

You may sometimes find that even though you are using the latest hardware, the graphics in pCon.planner are not working properly (pCon.planner is slow and loading often) or even lead to a program crash.

Modern systems can perform "simple" (e.g., office applications) graphics activities with a small, low-power chip. This ensures a longer battery life especially on mobile systems (laptops). But to perform more extensive calculations like the presentation of 3D content, materials and lighting (the calculations in pCon.planner) you need more power. An external graphics card (a second more powerful graphics card) that jumps in when the chip is overloaded takes care of this.

Most presentation and performance problems that occur when working with pCon.planner are caused by using the wrong graphics card. pCon.planner requires an up-to-date graphics card that is not older than 3 years. We recommend a driver from the major graphics card vendors, Nvidia and AMD. Furthermore you should make sure that you have the most recent driver.

1.1 Checking drivers

Often the problems with the views in pCon.planner are not due to the graphics hardware, but to a particular piece of software. The operating program (drivers), which is used to install it into the (Windows) operating system. For this reason we always recommend using an up-to-date driver for the graphics card. You can find these on the web pages of the manufacturer of the respective graphics card.

In pCon.planner you can check under Help / System Information whether your drivers are up-to-date.

1.2 Checking the graphics card

In just a few steps you can determine whether the external graphics card is used when working with pCon.planner. First of all you have to check if there are two graphics cards installed on your system by going to the Device Manager of your system. In the example you can see under Display adapters that a low-power chip from Intel and an external graphics card from NVIDIA are used.

2 Assigning NVIDIA graphics card

Right-click on the Windows desktop and select the NVIDIA Control Panel from the opened menu. If you can't find the menu under the desktop, open the Windows configuration screen and select the NVIDIA Control Panel there. In the navigation menu on the left side you will find the item 3D Settings / Manage 3D Settings. If you select this item you will see on the right side of the screen different setting options. For example, you can generally determine which graphics processor should be used as the default.

To have pCon.planner start using the NVIDIA graphics card do the following:

Go to Program settings. At step 1 (Select a program to customize) select pCon.planner. If pCon.planner is not in the list, click on Add / Browse and select the .exe file location of pCon.planner.

Now go to step 2 (Select the preferred graphics processor for this program) and select the High-performance NVIDIA processor. After you have performed these steps, click Apply and restart pCon.planner.

3 Assigning AMD graphics card

Right-click on the Windows desktop and select AMD Radeon Settings from the opened menu.

In the next window, click on System at the top right and select Switchable Graphics.

Now assign pCon.planner the High Performance option to enable the external graphics card.

If you cannot find pCon.planner in the list, you can switch from Currently running applications to Profiles / installed applications at the top of the menu bar and select pCon.planner with the Browse button in the installed path.