I have several laptops that run makerware and they all struggle to render the viewport? I suspect this is because of the awful on board Intel GMA 950 type GPU. I wonder if there is any way to make makerware use DirectX rather than OpenGL or is there a way to modify the graphics settings? Its so laggy its almost frame by frame, it feels as if the makerware is using software rendering not hardware does anyone know more about it.
Thanks in advance
GMA 950 is more than 10 years old. It’s like 10000B.C. in computer world 
You need to get a new computer with a good graphic card, not gaming graphics but a decent one like Intel HD graphics.
1 Like
Thats a good point, your right. 10 year old computers but its actually worse than that. I am trying to run the software on a 10 year old single core atom netbook. it works fine on a 10 year old dual core laptop using a similar GPU. I did manage to get older versions 3.4 working on the netbook with no problem using a modified driver and stripping some bloat off the OS. The only bottleneck seemed to be the GPUs ability to render the view, the rest of the software should be able to translate the STL into code and it wouldn’t be hard work for even a 20 year old CPU.
Maybe your models are over sampled, install meshlab and try to optimize the surfaces, see what are the number of vectors before and after optimization. If your models don’t have too much details then you can reduce the vectors even more without affecting the quality of your print. Then even rendering it in makerware would be faster.
1 Like
I know about optimizing mesh, unfortunately this isn’t the problem. The software Makerbot Desktop 3.8 and newer either crash on opening the prepare tab or won’t run at all. Definitely a problem with rendering the 3D viewport. Over the last few days I have spent hours digging into this problem and it is caused by the newer Makerbot Desktop releases requiring OpenGL 2.1 and my Intel on board graphics gma950 only supporting OpenGL 1.4. I have tried some quick fixes on the off chance but they didn’t work, including using MESA GL to render OpenGL via software. I will have to resort to using an older Makerbot software, the most recent I have been able to use without issue is Makerbot Desktop 3.6 dated around mid 2015, the problem with these older versions compared to newer is their available settings and options being quite limited. I haven’t tried 3.7 versions because I simply couldn’t find any link online to a x86 version that supports windows 8.1. if anyone has a 3.7 version they could link I would appreciate and thank you in advance.
