For years, the SOLIDWORKS development team has been working diligently to write code, and partner with hardware vendors, to continue to raise the bar for performance. The second sheet of this drawing contains even more views of this 2,400 part assembly, and the performance difference is even more pronounced. Scroll bar pans show a similar graphics performance gains in SOLIDWORKS 2021. Panning is better while zoomed in, but not as fast and precise as SOLIDWORKS 2021. Again, notice the latency, which can sometimes be confusing as you can overshoot your zoom magnification due to the delay.
For comparison, we will repeat the same steps in SOLIDWORKS 2020. Zooming in and out is just as dramatic, and panning while zoomed in is significantly faster. The same panning action in SOLIDWORKS 2021, on the right, is dramatically faster and is keeping up with the mouse, providing a much better experience. Notice that SOLIDWORKS 2020, on the left, does a great job, but you can see that there is some latency as the drawing doesn’t precisely follow the mouse. Let’s start with panning the drawing in the document window. In this side-by-side comparison of SOLIDWORKS 2020 and SOLIDWORKS 2021, the same 5-sheet drawing is opened.
For Drawings in SOLIDWORKS 2021, the Advanced Graphics Performance option has been extended to the drawing environment. ‘Detailing Mode’ was introduced in SOLIDWORKS 2020 to allow users to open massive drawings in seconds, and for assemblies, the ‘Advanced Graphics Performance’ option was implemented to take advantage of high-end graphics cards by moving the graphics burden to the card. When working with large assembly drawings, view manipulation is vital to a good user experience, and over the years, SOLIDWORKS has worked hard to optimise view manipulations on the screen.