To help designers exploit the power of 3D PCB design in the most cost-effective way, Altium has completed performance tests of commonly available graphics cards running the winter 09 release of Altium Designer.
Video cards are a critical hardware element to being able to do electronics design, especially PCB layout, in new ways. Different cards also perform at different speeds when running Altium Designer, and it’s not the case that the best performers are necessarily the most expensive.
With this set of benchmarks, designers can decide which card best suits their needs and budget.
Altium has also introduced new concepts in the new winter 09 release of Altium Designer to let designers explore new techniques and design possibilities. A new Field Instrumentation dashboard will help designers overcome some of the challenges of testing or remotely monitoring designs inside FPGAs. And a new plug-and-play Software Platform Builder will help designers quickly ‘snap’ together systems and exploit a standard set of services within the ‘soft’ hardware environment created inside programmable devices.