By now you would not only heard but seen the latest release of  2012 AutoCAD Products. As always there is that time where you find your way around the product and play with the new features. This is also the time where you may find things that bug you for a bit but as always there is a simple fix.

One of these things that I have found is when I launch AutoCAD for the first time and start creating my lines I noticed that my dynamic input was slow the model space graphics looked glitchy, and as I drag to place the endpoint of my line it was slow to complete and exit the command.

Through experimentation and playing!! I found that by default AutoCAD 2012 was using Software Graphics. What is software graphics?

Software graphics is the use of software-based graphics processing rather than hardware-based and it is often seen as the last resort. We would use software graphics if there was no graphics card available or an old outdated graphics card that would not have driver support.

To resolve this we need to turn on Hardware Acceleration Graphics. As you might have guessed it uses the hardware of your PC to generate the on-screen graphics in AutoCAD. It will use all that processing power from your graphics card and you will find a huge increase in response and overall performance.

How to do this:

1) Open a new or a file that you are working on in AutoCAD

2) Go the bottom right-hand corner

3) If you hover the mouse you will notice that Hardware acceleration is off

4) left mouse click on the icon and it will display a context menu

5) From the menu select “Hardware Acceleration” to activate.

6) You will now notice the Icon is activated and “Hardware Acceleration” is activated.

Try it you will notice the difference straight away

Hope this helps

Ray