Selecting the correct graphics card for Tekla Structures and/ or Tekla Structural Designer in NVIDIA Control Panel

Tekla Structures
Tekla Structural Designer
Not version-specific
Tekla Structural Designer
Not version-specific
Tekla Structures
graphics card
Environment
Not environment-specific

Often laptops come with both integrated graphics card (iGPU) and dedicated graphics card (GPU). An integrated graphics card doesn't use its own RAM; it utilizes the system's memory instead, whereas dedicated graphics card has its own independent source of memory. The dedicated graphics card is the more powerful of these two, and you can adjust the graphics card settings to always use the more powerful one in system that has both an iGPU and GPU. 

 

These instructions walk through setting the dedicated NVIDIA graphics card to be used by default with Tekla Structures and/ or Tekla Structural Designer. If you have a different brand graphics card, see these instructions.

1. To check how many graphics cards you have, open Windows Device Manager. In this example, Intel(R) HD Graphics 5500 is the integrated graphics card, and NVIDIA GeForce 840M is dedicated graphics card.  

 

 

 

Image
dev_manager.PNG

 



2. To access NVIDIA Control Panel, you can right click Windows Desktop and select 'NVIDIA Control Panel', or access it through an icon on Windows System Tray.

3. On NVIDIA Control Panel, choose Manage 3D Settings and choose the graphics card that you would like to be the default for all programs - High-performance NVIDIA Processor. This will set the NVIDIA card to be used by default with all programs.

 

 

 

 

Image
manage_3D.PNG

 



Alternatively, to set the NVIDIA graphics card to be used by default only with Tekla Structures (or another product)

  • Go to the Program Settings tab
  • Click 'Select a program to customize' drop down, and select Tekla Structures.
  • If you can't find it on the list, click 'Add' to add Tekla Structures on the list. Then, on the preferred graphics processor drop down menu, select the High-performance NVIDIA processor and click 'Apply'.  
  • Repeat this process for any other programs such as Tekla Structural Designer you wish to use the GPU.

 

 

 

 

Image
manage_3D_2.PNG

 




In addition to adjusting the graphics card settings, you can also optimize your Windows performance. On Windows System > Power and sleep settings, go to 'Additional power settings' and choose the 'High performance' option. 
 

 

Was this helpful?