Performance Enhancements & New Rendering Engine (New Feature Summary)

Altium Designer 18.0 brings a number of enhancements and optimizations to increase performance, as well as a new Rendering Engine - combining to make your design experience sleek, smooth, and lightning fast. The following sections summarize these two areas.

Performance

• 64-bit - the software now has access to more memory, and the code has been refactored in many areas, and written in C#, which has better memory management, and more efficient access to all that 64-bit and multi-threading has to offer.
• Loading/opening files is considerably faster in comparison to Altium Designer 17.x.
• ECO and movement of components in PCB has been optimized.
• Interactive routing speed has been improved.
• Multi-threading used in many areas, including:
  • Project Compilation
  • Repouring of Polygon Pours
  • Design Rule Checking
  • Output Generation

• Refactored Net Connectivity Analysis engine ("Analyzing Ground") - shaving considerable time off of repouring your polygon pours and performing online DRC.
• Multi-process Project Releaser.
• BOM report generator speedup.

New Rendering Engine

• New DirectX renderer - making better use of GPU resources.
• Nicer shading and coloring.
• Faster 2D-to-3D context switching, with almost instantaneous response.
• Lower system memory usage, by  utilizing more memory on the graphics card.
• Faster 3D performance.
• Rendering of models more photo-realistic, with anti-aliasing of the highest quality (and disabled during movement so as to not unduly impact performance).
• CAMtastic renderer update - providing better Gerber/ODB++/IPC CAM editing (and smooth zooming!).