I wanted to pass along some additional graphics card related information. First, I highly recommend reading through the Graphics Card FAQ page. It has a lot of great information regarding graphics cards and should be required reading. Now for the Lenovo w500...
If you are using Revit 2011 and have a Lenovo® w500 with an ATI® Mobility FireGL V5700 graphics card, I have included some information for you below:
Hardware Acceleration was disabled for Lenovo W500 computers based on reported general instability issues.
The underlying cause is not specific to Revit, but it could occur more frequently during the use of Revit if hardware acceleration was enabled. These issues included crashes, blue screens, and general stability issues.
There are 3 parts to the fix for this issue:
1. Lenovo has made a fix available for this issue which requires a BIOS update.
2. After the BIOS update the graphics card driver can be updated to the recommended version.
3. However since this graphics card configuration was not supported for Revit 2011 because of this issue, the OCAReport.XML file will need to be deleted.
If you fall under this hardware \ graphics card combination, and would like to work through this issue, I have included the steps below:
1. First, if you have been experiencing stability issues disable PowerPlay in the Catalyist Control Center > Graphics Settings > PowerPlay. Un-check Enable PowerPlay.
2. If after disabling PowerPlay you see improvement in stability, the BIOS fix should permanently resolve this issue for you.
3. Below is the description for updating the BIOS:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-73619
4. Here is the link for updating the BIOS:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-70353
5. After the BIOS is updated, the graphics card driver can be updated to the recommended driver. The link for this driver is below:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/TPAD-ISV.html#Inventor
Choose Inventor > ThinkPad W500. Note that the BIOS link is also available on this page as well.
6. Restart the workstation after installing the graphics driver.
7. Delete the following file on the workstation; “C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Revit Architecture 2011\Program\ OCAReport.XML”. The next time you launch Revit you can now enable hardware acceleration.
8. Also, with the BIOS and driver updated on the workstation you can typically re-enable ATI PowerPlay.
I hope this helps any users with this configuration!