Who is using SW 2021?

[Lapuo]

@Lapuo In what areas?

Biggest difference is in opening files.
Drawings also.

We are integrated with pro.file that could be cause also

[jcapriotti]

Biggest difference is in opening files.
Drawings also.

We are integrated with pro.file that could be cause also

Have the files been saved in the latest version of SolidWorks? I know that can affect open times and it gets worse with large assemblies. PDM systems complicates this ability to update the files though. Some have tools to do and some don't.

Pro.file is a new one to me. Why do PLM companies make it so hard to see what the software looks like and what it can do? They hide it all behind fancy PowerPoint presentations and cutesy videos of meeples dancing around icons of "data".

[Lapuo]

Have the files been saved in the latest version of SolidWorks? I know that can affect open times and it gets worse with large assemblies. PDM systems complicates this ability to update the files though. Some have tools to do and some don't.

Pro.file is a new one to me. Why do PLM companies make it so hard to see what the software looks like and what it can do? They hide it all behind fancy PowerPoint presentations and cutesy videos of meeples dancing around icons of "data".

Yes they are saved to latest version.
Opening times are ridiculous even with smaller assemblies with few parts.

[Bradfordzzz]

@Lapuo , @Bradfordzzz ,
Just curious what you guys find worse about 2021 than the version you're on? Seems to be very dependent on the type of work you do.

Mostly Automotive Checking Fixture Designs.

[Per S]

I use 2021 and it works okey, feel more speed then in 2020. But som graphic issue they still work on. Try turn of Enhanced graphics performance now.

[Damo]

Sadly my experience with 2021 has been rather lacklustre. (I am currently running SP2)
I feel had better reliabilty from 2014 and better performance from 2016. (Tho this is difficult to quantify with certainty, given backwards incompatibility)

I am finding numerous graphical glitches. Random displaying of wireframe in modelspace when shaded with edges is selected as default. It dissipates when hovering the curser over the bodies. There are section views in slddrw files that don't section..!?
Also in slddrw files I am seeing "ghosted" lines in views of unselected bodies as the curser hovers over them. These ghosted entities are actually selectable but not dimensionable. This is not only annoying but also some faces, that are not selected to show in the view, actually prevent me being able to select the edges I wish to dimension. (The workaround is: Open the model from the context menu, Refresh the model, return to the drawing file.. EVERY TIME..?!?! (I've not experienced either of these in previous versions.)

Sketching: I find very frequently many "Converted" entities that lose their reference from whence they were converted. Worse, occassionally, re-attaching them with Relations too often causes Overdefined errors. Although they seemed to work just fine when first converted.
This is something I've seen before in previous versions... But I'm convinced the occurrence of this is more prevalent now in 2021.
(I do know this occurs naturally as faces and bodies change throughout the design process.. But I am aware of this and too often there seems to be no good reason for it.)

Mates: Now I am not a fan of mates at the best of times, but of course I do use them too.. (people who model without parametrics and simply mate everything together are pure evil.!!)
But I frequently get mate errors in my assembly feature tree that simply need to be deleted and recreated. Then they work fine.. !?!?
This is very frustrating when one must, without choice, delete and repeat steps almost ad-nauseam. It can cause one to question ones sanity..
(ie. I know this should work like this.. Oh yeah, this time it did work correctly, despite doing it again no different to last time...!?!?!)
I've also noticed that the feature tree frequently and randomly creates it's own "Folders" and inserts random mates into them. Sometimes one or two.. Sometimes many.. Both Folders and Mates..!?!?! Unless there is a new setting or keystroke combination I am both unaware of and unwittingly applying, Even so, I do wish it would not.. (I've not experienced this in previous versions.)

The measure tool: It behaves oddly on occassion. It'll give off a dimension from somewhere way off screen instead of from the selected face/edge/vertice. This seems to happen mostly when "Point-to-point" is selected. (I've not experienced this in previous versions.)

In my Weldment cut-list properties dialog box, occassionally I will open it to add a description or link a dimension and the "Property Name" column will be 'Missing'..!?! The workaround is: Click OK to close the dialog and open it again.. (I've not experienced this in previous versions.)
There are also bugs here that have remained unfixed for several versions... Occassionally when adding properties to the Weldment cut-list properties dialog box, and selecting the next entry, the previous entities entries will remain and the cells do not populate correctly for the next item. Upon closing the dialog box and re-opening one will discover that all previously entered properties are not there.. I do not know if they automatically are deleted or were simply never accepted.. But I do know re-typing properties is a time-wasting frustration I can do without. (See above mention of ad-nauseam insanity. ) And Linking sheetmetal thicknesses to the description cell by clicking the dimension in modelspace, as one would would for "Boss Extrudes" is a "crap-shoot" at best and sometimes simply doesn't work at all.
Crashes..!! I swear this version has already crashed more times than any other version I have ever used.
Sometimes its not a crash per se, it just hangs... and hangs... and hangs... It's a trade-off between how long to wait or shut it down and start again.
I had one example just the other day where I opened a part from within an assembly, made a small edit, saved and closed the part, and waited 20mins for the already open assembly to rebuild and display on screen. I gave up and forced a shut-down of SW. When I restarted SW and repeated the actions, it worked perfectly.. immediately.
And on that note, I am frequently seeing some ridiculously long rebuild times when switching between windows of components within the same assembly, usually after any editing.
On the subject of Crashes. the number of times the crash reporter has actually worked is a tiny fraction of the time. It usually just fails and tells me 'There was a problem sending the report to the Customer Improvement Program'. (I'm supposed to trust SW's/Dassault's servers for the Cloud- Based Version..?!?!)

So.. I have been using Solidworks everyday in my employ for several years and I have used most versions from 2013 onwards (2013,2014,2015,2016,2018,2020 & now 2021) since I first used this software in 2013. I like to think I mostly know what I am doing and tho I am aware there is still more I can learn, most of these issues I am experiencing lately are previously unseen to me.

Finally, I am getting the "Resources are Running Low" error from the Resource Manager almost every time I start up the SW-2021 software.
You may interpret from this rant that I am somewhat unimpressed with this latest evolution of the software. Indeed, you'd be correct.
And so, in anticipation of inevitable queries regarding my hardware setup.. I have Win-10 on a Xeon 3.9GHz CPU, Quadro RTX 4000 and 64GB of ECC DDR4 RAM. All files are 'Local' on SSD HDD's. I do not use a network server here for file storage/transfer, etc., nor do I use PDM.

In summary, FWIW, I have only a few projects that I am using this version for and I WILL NOT be updating any other projects to this version either.
Nor will I be starting any new models with this version and I will remain with 2014 & 2016 (Files Permitting) as long as humanly possible for the forseeable future. I also doubt I will ever voluntarily update to a newer version without some extremely compelling and irrefutable evidence that it will benefit me..

Were I the suspicious paranoid type, I'd assume this was done on purpose to encourage the user base to move away from the desktop environment into the new cloud-based setup that is being widely touted of late.. Regardless.. I am very reluctant to go that direction, given they've had soooo long to fix their software and there are what seems to me to be many NEW glitches.. I can only horrifyingly imagine the short-falls of a new and largely untried system in a commercial manufacturing environment.

Yep.. That was quite a rant. But since you asked..
.... and I needed to get it off my chest.

[Frederick_Law]

Graphic - Turn on/off Enhanced Graphic Performance. Try latest nVidia driver. Yes, latest, not certified. I have a GTX-1070 with Enhanced On.
When assembly get busy, I get the "wire frame" in graphic.

Sketch and Mate - Yes, SW lost reference. As simple as adding a line to a sketch with cause hell in everything after it. Solution: start a new sketch.

Low resource - Set your Windows page file size larger. Start with 64GB. See here: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=450

[Jim Steinmeyer]

Mates: Now I am not a fan of mates at the best of times, but of course I do use them too.. (people who model without parametrics and simply mate everything together are pure evil.!!)

Yep.. That was quite a rant. But since you asked..
.... and I needed to get it off my chest.

Curious, "Model without parametrics and simply mate everything together"? Are you referring to mating origin to origin, or something else?

[Glenn Schroeder]

Mates: Now I am not a fan of mates at the best of times, but of course I do use them too.. (people who model without parametrics and simply mate everything together are pure evil.!!) Please explain. I use Mates often, and don't know how I'd model without them.
But I frequently get mate errors in my assembly feature tree that simply need to be deleted and recreated. Then they work fine.. !?!?
This is very frustrating when one must, without choice, delete and repeat steps almost ad-nauseam. It can cause one to question ones sanity.. Try suppressing and then un-suppressing mates instead of deleting and re-creating. Or even just a Ctrl+Q rebuild.

[Damo]

Graphic - Turn on/off Enhanced Graphic Performance. Try latest nVidia driver. Yes, latest, not certified. I have a GTX-1070 with Enhanced On.
When assembly get busy, I get the "wire frame" in graphic.
This setting was selected as "ON" I have it now as "OFF." .. We shall see how this affects things. So far, a couple of hours now, I've not seen the "Wireframe"...

Sketch and Mate - Yes, SW lost reference. As simple as adding a line to a sketch with cause hell in everything after it. Solution: start a new sketch.
Yes. I have also had this thought. It does annoy me somewhat that I cannot keep things all nice-n-tidy in one sketch where possible.

Low resource - Set your Windows page file size larger. Start with 64GB. See here: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=450DUH.. I'm a little annoyed that this never occurred to me to try. And so, now I have tried. So far so good, this morning was the first time since I got this PC that I did not get the low resources warning.

Very good advice, thank you Fred. ;

[Damo]

Curious, "Model without parametrics and simply mate everything together"? Are you referring to mating origin to origin, or something else?

Mates: Now I am not a fan of mates at the best of times, but of course I do use them too.. (people who model without parametrics and simply mate everything together are pure evil.!!) Please explain. I use Mates often, and don't know how I'd model without them.

Oh I do use mates.. But I try to limit the amount I use. I do a lot of "Top-Down" Modelling. If something in an assembly doesn't move.. It is mated as "In-Context" and becomes fixed in place at the origin, with any downstream parametrics driven from a sketch(es) within the top-level assembly... Tho, I've experienced even these mates throwing up an error too.. (It is frustrating that they cannot be re-created. So I already just do as Glenn has suggested, Suppress-Unsuppress. This does work often enough to be a useful tactic. When not successful, I will simply delete them and mate at origin with aligned axes and keep moving forward. All moving components are separate assemblies mated within the top-level assemblies as you would expect and anything not moving within those assemblies are also "In-Context" Mated.. etc.

"people who model without parametrics and simply mate everything together are pure evil.!!"
I really only meant that: As in, EVERYTHING' ..! ie. no parametrics at all..!!

[Robert Wijnands]

Hello Robert,.. curious.. have you guys tested a near equiv card like NVIDIA Quadro P2000 5GB and see if it helps... or not?

Hi, long way back, but I think its worth to mention an update; in the mean time I've been busy addressing the various problems and discussing them with our software service supplier. As a result, these guys have filed a number of tickets and over a period of months I was occasionally informed if and/or when these were solved. About a month and a half ago I migrated to SP5.1 noticing that all but one is now solved.

The only one still remaining is the issue with the Enhanced graphics performance (→ Options → System Options → Performance → Enhanced graphics performance [toggle on/off]), in where the Shaded View with Edges at a certain moment loses its color:

This issue however, can be ignored by (ahem...) not using the hardware accelerator option (which, by the way, was specifically designed to improve working with the AMD FirePro/ Radeon Pro graphics cards...)

[IndianaDave]

I just went from 2011 (old job) to 2021 (new job). How's that for a leap?

Holy Hell!!! That IS a leap!
Talk about getting your moneys worth!
I'd imagine going back and using that version from our SW21 would be like going back and playing Nintendo 64 after playing my kids XBox!