Understanding Visualization module performance

In general, the speed of postprocessing and graphical results display in the Visualization module is more than satisfactory for most models. However, it is often necessary to balance high performance levels with detailed results plotting. Depending on your postprocessing requirements, you may wish to modify the default display options at the expense of performance. Many options are available that can affect the speed of graphics display.

To maximize performance in the Visualization module, we recommend the following:

  • Cache results in memory during postprocessing to speed up the generation of images on the screen. See Understanding results caching.

  • Use the texture-mapped contour method whenever possible. Likewise, avoid using display options that are not supported by the texture-mapped method: line-type contours, contour edges, CAXA or SAXA elements, or shrinking elements about their centroid. If such display options are used, Abaqus/CAE will override the user setting for texture-mapped contours and use the slower tessellated method instead. See Understanding how contours are rendered.

  • Be selective about the model labels and symbols that you choose to display. The more model entities that are drawn, the longer the screen refresh will take. This applies to element edges as well. See Controlling the display of model entities.

  • Use a high results averaging threshold. The more contiguous the results are, the faster the contour display will be. See Understanding result value averaging.

  • Use the status field output variable rather than creating display groups based on result values to achieve high-performance time history animation. Abaqus/CAE recomputes result-based display groups as each result frame is displayed, so using this type of display group degrades animation performance. The status field output variable allows you to remove elements that meet a result-based failure criteria from your model plots. See Selecting the status field output variable.

  • Do not use a remote display. This configuration of Abaqus/CAE is not supported; its use is at the sole discretion of the user. Performance optimization can never be achieved using remote display.

In some cases performance may not be optimal for element-based results plotting on very large models because of physical memory limits on your machine. Increasing the physical memory or exiting other applications that are consuming memory can help to restore optimal performance.