IRONCAD 2009 Startup Crash Fix And 3D Graphics Performance

The reason I could not add IRONCAD 2009 to my graphics performance comparison was because it kept crashing on start up.

I have been working with IronCAD Support to fix this issue for quite a while now. Finally we had to resort to Windows Debugger to pin point the cause of the crash. We almost tore the hair off our heads when we found that IRONCAD worked fine when called from the debugger, but crashed when run normally. Anyways, the information from the debugger led us to a number of trial and error kind of tweaks, one of which finally solved the problem.

The problem was something called Relevant Knowledge which is explained as follows:

RelevantKnowledge is a tracking cookie that may monitor your Internet habits and activities and display various surveys in popup windows. Your response to these popup surveys may be aggregated and may help determine what content you see when you are surfing the web. RelevantKnowledge may be part of an online market research community.

I have no idea how this piece of crap landed on my computer. After I uninstalled it from the Windows Control Panel, IRONCAD 2009 stopped crashing on start up. Thought I’d mention this here in case any of you are facing this problem.

Anyways, I loaded the engine model into IRONCAD 2009 and gave it a spin.

As you can see, IRONCAD uses the same technique as CoCreate Modeling and KOMPAS-3D by hiding the edges when the model is being rotated. I am told that the next version will have an option to leave the display of edges turned on. After the navigation stops, it actually take some time to calculate the edges. You can also see that a bunch of parts go missing during the rotation. I believe there is a lot of scope for improvement here. I intend to try this in their next version which I am told is IRONCAD 2011. I think they are skipping 2010.