Pretty much what the title says. I'm sick and tired of trying to find user-generated hotfixes for stuff like this. Unfortunately I've searched high and low, tried every fix for this issue (in older threads) and I'm back to square one. I can enable FSAA just fine but it doesn't actually do anything. Edges are just as jagged as ever.
I'm running Windows 10 on a Thinkpad W530 with a K2000 GPU, plenty of RAM, through a dock with 2 external monitors. I thought it might be external monitors but no, does the same thing when it's just the laptop. I've tried forcing AA through the nVidia control panel to no effect. I tried leaving it to Solidworks to figure out but that's a laugh.
I downgraded the Quadro drivers to the most recent "tested" version recommended by Solidworks. Nothing.
This is a really stupid problem to have to spend 2 days googling. I found a thread from 2010 (!!!) discussing this issue with a user-provided hotfix which sadly did not work for me. In that thread a SW representative assured everyone they would fix it "soon." Apart from adding a non-functional (in my case) menu option I'm not seeing the effort.
Anybody have any tips for me? I've got "certified" drivers, a "certified" laptop, the most recent service pack. Apparently that's not enough so please just help me figure out which gremlin is causing the issue. I remember the first time I played a low-budget video game that supported anti-aliasing. Was pretty awesome at the time. I think it was back in 1998. Damned if Dassault can crack that nut in a measly 2 decades though.
Thanks for any guidance.
I'm using 2017 SP3.0. I've been using SW since 2013 and have always been annoyed by the lack of anti aliasing but just figured there's probably nothing I can do about it. But today I decided to look into it again randomly, and I'm disappointed. I was surprised to find that it's actually on by default in System Options > Display because I couldn't tell there was any AA going on. I turned it off and if you look closely, it does actually do some AA but it's just so terrible that it doesn't look like it is. In fact I think it looks better with it off completely.
The image on the left is with AA off, the image on the right is with it on. If you look closely you can see that it is trying to fade the jagged edges but it makes the lines too thick in the process which basically ruins the minimal AA that is happening. Plus look at the head of the screw with AA on, what the heck. The AA fails so badly it misses pixels in the render with a transparent surface. I don't know much about GPU rendering, but that's just not right.
So the AA works, it's just horrendous. I don't think it effects productivity, but it would do a whole lot for my overall user experience. I'm blown away by the AA in the video games I play, I wish my visual experience in solidworks was that enjoyable.
I'll be leaving AA off for now I think.