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Troubleshooting Tips- Unable to Activate RealView Graphics
This video explains why RealView Graphics may be unavailable in SOLIDWORKS and how to restore it. Learn how hardware compatibility, Software OpenGL, and Large Assembly Mode affect RealView visibility. The walkthrough shows how to identify each cause and re-enable enhanced graphics for clearer, more realistic model visualization.
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The visual characteristics that we have in SOLIDWORKS have got even more impressive over the last few years, almost to the point where normal usage of SOLIDWORKS is quite close to photorealistic. Here's an example where we've got this pallet control panel, pallet dispenser, and the appearances, shadow calculations and so forth make the model look very, very realistic, it's really easy to communicate this with potential clients. One of the ways that we do this inside SOLIDWORKS is through our RealView Graphics capabilities. Now RealView Graphics is, sometimes we get questions on this on support because users don't have access to the graphics like they expect. So I'm just going to talk about some of the reasons why the option might not be available. First and foremost, the access point for RealView Graphics is either from the button called View Settings on your heads-up display and you'll see RealView Graphics. So this is it deactivated, quite basic graphical representation, and this is it activated where we have much more enhanced calculations of shadows and reflections and so forth. You can also access it through the View menu under Display and again RealView Graphics near the bottom here. But there are occasions where you might find that the option disappears. Now it could be a hardware issue or a software issue. In terms of hardware issues, it might very well be that you're on a computer that doesn't support the RealView Graphics because it is a function of the graphics or video card. If the video card isn't supported by SOLIDWORKS, i.e. a general off-the-shelf laptop that you've bought, then you might not have access to these enhanced graphics. Another reason is there's an option within SOLIDWORKS which allows you to exclude or dismiss the graphics card. It's under Performance and it's a checkbox called Use Software OpenGL. This, rather than using the hardware graphics acceleration, uses the onboard motherboard software. It's less capable, therefore you will not have access to RealView Graphics using this method. But the final one, and the one that generally tends to throw customers from a support point of view, is nothing to do with any of those settings. It's when you open a particular data set and the option is not available. So I'm going to switch over to another data set which is actually a much bigger assembly. Now this assembly has quite a few hundred parts and if I go back to the view settings button, you'll notice that RealView Graphics is not available to me. Now this is purely down to the fact that what has been activated is a standard in SOLIDWORKS called the large assembly mode. And when large assembly mode is activated to try and improve performance, various things are excluded from the software. And one of those inclusions are the enhanced graphics through RealView. So I know that I've got large assembly mode because at the bottom of the screen here you'll see the option in the status bar. So if I turn off large assembly mode, which is done via the tools menu, and then down to large assembly mode near the bottom here, what you'll find is the graphics come back into view and I'm then able to select RealView graphics. Now large assembly mode can be triggered after a number of components is available in the assembly. So upon opening, if the default setting of 500 components is exceeded, then the RealView graphics will be dismissed and large assembly mode will become activated. But as you can see now, the graphics are much more enhanced and all of the settings become available to me within the drop down menu. So it might not necessarily be a hardware issue, you might not need to reinstall graphics drives and so forth. Just think about the particular document you're opening. If you're not quite sure if you've activated large assembly mode, open a single component, a single part document and see if the RealView graphics returns.