Revit 2013 and Video Cards

UPDATE:

NVIDIA Driver 296.35 (or maybe a complete system rebuild... take your pick) has resolved this issue for me. I no longer have transparent materials bleeding through my walls.

Original post below:

Revit 2013 and Video CardsI’m playing around a little with Revit 2013 and have been finding an issue with my video card, 3D views, and transparent materials. Any surface that has a transparent material on it (like glass) shows through the model, even if it should be hidden from view:

To verify that it was truly transparency and not some other material or object setting, I modified the glass material’s transparency setting to make it… well… not transparent. :) As you can see in the image below, that fixed the issue for the blue glass, but other transparent materials bled through just as before.

So what now? You can’t go through and turn off transparency in all materials for many reasons (including graphic display, energy analysis and the fact that you really just shouldn’t need to do this at all!). There are a couple of things at play here. First and foremost, as I go into Display Options in Revit, my video card is not a certified video card, and it tells me straight up that if things aren’t working right, to turn off hardware acceleration.

Well, OK, turning off hardware acceleration fixes everything – material transparency is back on and it all looks good on screen, but darn it, I want to have hardware acceleration!

At this point, if you have a similar issue to me, you probably have two options:

1. Wait for NVIDIA to update their driver to fix this issue
2. See if a different, older, driver fixes things.

I have a colleague that has a slightly different video card that was showing the same issue. He was able to go to the Autodesk site and find a certified driver for his video card and Inventor 2012, installed it instead of the most recent one on the NVIDIA site, and it resolved his display issues. Not so much luck for me. I’ll deal with no hardware acceleration and wait for an updated driver to hopefully fix the problem.

... and in all honesty, I'm OK with that...

smell the roses

joe

Comments

[Wesley O'Brien]

"Glad" to see i am not the only one with this problem. Just got Revit 2013 installed today and once i was in a project the transparency issue was rather obvious and distracting. I would do the software route but the current project i am designing on is too complex to use the CPU over GPU. I will probably end up using 2012 in the mean time but keep an eye on new driver releases, can't wait to really start using the new features in 2013!

(GPU: Nvidia gtx570 Drivers: 296.10 WHQL)

[Joe Eichenseer]

Hopefully they are updated soon - but have you tried navigating your model in 2013 without hardware acceleration? I've been impressed from time to time with its performance.

Joe

[Dan]

I have heard the beta drivers from nVidia solve this problem (300 series). I've also heard that Revit uses about double the video ram in '13 vs '12. Seems pretty buggy - about to try the beta drivers myself to see if the work (I have a gtx 580).

[Joe Eichenseer]

Thanks for the comment, Dan - I'll have to look for beta drivers for my card as well and I'll post back here with the results.

joe

[Carl Price]

Hi there, just found this fix which worked for me after searching for hours and trying different driver versions:-

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Have-you-experienced-visualizations-issues-68075.S.104970090

"Have you seen Windows or glass material through walls in 3D views?
Uncheck Anti-Aliasing under Graphics Options (you need to re-launch Revit) and check “Show Ambient Shadows” box under Graphic Display Options in the 3D view, it works for me."

I'm using Revit 2013 (build 20120221_2030(x64) ) with the certified driver version 8.17.12.7642 (or called 276.42 by Nvidia if I'm correct).

My spec. is:-

Win 7 Pro 64 bit
Nvidia Quadro 400
Intel Core i5-2400 (@3.10)
6GB Memory
Lenovo Thinkcentre system

Hope this helps anyone out there as it was driving me nuts!

11th Hour

[Joe Eichenseer]

Thanks, Carl!

[Nelus]

Thanks Carl.
It work, iven with Anti-Aliasing chek.

Thanks!