Performance Enhancements & New Rendering Engine

The feature documented here is no longer part of the software beyond version 18.0. Click to return to: Altium Designer Documentation for version 24

Applies to Altium Designer version: 18.0

Altium Designer 18.0 brings a number of enhancements and optimizations to increase performance, as well as a new Rendering Engine - combining to make your design experience sleek, smooth, and lightning fast. The following sections summarize these two areas.

Performance

  • 64-bit - the software now has access to more memory, and the code has been refactored in many areas, and written in C#, which has better memory management, and more efficient access to all that 64-bit and multi-threading has to offer.
  • Loading/opening files is considerably faster in comparison to Altium Designer 17.x.
  • ECO and movement of components in PCB has been optimized.
  • Interactive routing speed has been improved.
  • Multi-threading used in many areas, including:
    • Project Compilation
    • Repouring of Polygon Pours
    • Design Rule Checking
    • Output Generation
Complex designs (and now multi-board designs) often featuring thousands of nets and components could routinely take hours to perform many of these processes. Now, with multi-threading, in conjunction with refactored code and a 64-bit environment, these processes really fly, taking seconds or minutes - lightning performance giving you more design time.
  • Refactored Net Connectivity Analysis engine ("Analyzing Ground") - shaving considerable time off of repouring your polygon pours and performing online DRC.
  • Multi-process Project Releaser.
  • BOM report generator speedup.

New Rendering Engine

  • New DirectX renderer - making better use of GPU resources.
  • Nicer shading and coloring.
  • Faster 2D-to-3D context switching, with almost instantaneous response.
  • Lower system memory usage, by  utilizing more memory on the graphics card.
  • Faster 3D performance.
  • Rendering of models more photo-realistic, with anti-aliasing of the highest quality (and disabled during movement so as to not unduly impact performance).
  • CAMtastic renderer update - providing better Gerber/ODB++/IPC CAM editing (and smooth zooming!).

 

Note

The features available depend on your level of Altium Designer Software Subscription.