Navigation Graphics - What do these settings do?

The Vectorworks Graphics Module or VGM provides enhanced visual capabilities compared to prior versions of the software. These capabilities depend directly on the speed, memory, and the various technologies supported by your graphics card. These features have the potential to provide a very fast and fluid experience if used on capable hardware, or a noticeably slower experience if used on older or less powerful hardware.

Note that these settings affect zooming, panning and editing only, not the speed of renderings powered by Renderworks.

NONE of these settings affect the output to exported files or to printouts, only how Vectorworks' drawing area responds to the user onscreen. During troubleshooting, it may be recommended that you reduce this setting to either work around a problem or to increase responsiveness of the application. Below is an outline of the differences between these various modes:

Under Tools > Options > Vectorworks Preferences > Display, There are now three new options for Navigation Graphics; Best Performance, Good Performance and Compatibility, and Best Compatibility. These options give you a wide range of control.

Best Performance:

The first and default option , will give you the best overall visual performance for navigation graphics. This includes VGM Top/Plan performance, which provides responsive 2D navigation. This option, will place the heaviest load on your graphics hardware and is best used with newer graphics cards, that have a minimum of 2GB of dedicated graphics memory. This load will increase if you have multiple or high resolution displays. In these environments, we recommend a dedicated graphics cards, with 2 to 4GB of graphics memory.

If you have had to drop to either of the lower two settings during troubleshooting, you should try working again in the highest setting after major updates and service packs to see if the issue was resolved. Best Performance is the intended experience.

Good Performance and Compatibility: 

This option, will provide a similar experience to previous versions of Vectorworks software. The VGM will no longer control 2D Top/Plan graphics, but you will still have the benefits of Enhanced Navigation Graphics for panning and zooming. This will reduce the overall load on your graphics hardware. This is ideal for older graphics cards or integrated graphics processors.

Best Compatibility:

This option will disable Enhanced Navigation Graphics as well and can cause Vectorworks to delay updating your view until a changes is made or until you zoom or pan. This option, is best for very old graphics cards that have may have less graphics memory as well as slow integrated graphics processors.