Altium Designer’s PCB editor has a new Hardware Accelerated Graphics Engine. This engine provides a substantial increase in drawing speed over the current GDI-based graphics engine, providing smooth, real-time graphics 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 on the Graphics card Processor Unit (GPU), instead of on the main CPU.

Traditionally the graphics card is treated as a dumb pixel painter, where the application code first renders the image as a bitmap in memory and then passes all of the pixel data from the main CPU to the GPU.

Using Shader modeling technology the rendering code is executed on the GPU, the application code 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.

The new Hardware Accelerated Graphics Engine will:

• Provide drawing speed improvements in the order of 20 times over GDI.
• Remove the impact of polygons on drawing speed.
• Provide smooth panning and scrolling, at all zoom levels.
• Maintain drawing and panning performance for the largest of boards.
• Be thoroughly tested and benchmarked on a wide variety of graphics cards.
• Work in harmony with the existing graphics engine, allowing the user to switch between them as needed.

Note that the new graphics engine requires a graphics card that supports DirectX® 9.0c and Shader Model 3.0.

Use the following links to learn more about Shader technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shader
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb147365.aspx