Is there a way to disable 3D acceleration?

Normally, the applications in the CSD Portfolio suite that have 3D visualisers - e.g. Mercury or Hermes - require a computer with hardware 3D acceleration. However, there are some usage scenarios where hardware 3D acceleration is unavailable or causes problems - e.g. when using the CSD Portfolio software through a Remote Desktop connection or in a virtual machine, or on older hardware or graphics drivers that do not support OpenGL 2.1.

In these usage scenarios, a variety of issues can occur, from the software performing very poorly to just simply crashing once it tries to draw the 3D view. While we don't generally support all of these situations (such as running over a Remote Desktop connection or X11 Forwarding on Linux), it is possible to disable the use of 3D hardware and force a fallback to software-driven 3D display which can fix these problems.

Please note that this process is not supported on macOS.

In order to disable 3D acceleration across all our products that support it, you can simply set the QT_OPENGL environment variable to software before running the applications. To try out whether this will work for you, open a Command Prompt or Terminal window and run the following commands:

On Windows:

SET QT_OPENGL=software

"%USERPROFILE%\CCDC\ccdc-software\mercury\mercury.exe"

On Linux:

export QT_OPENGL=software

~/CCDC/ccdc-software/mercury/bin/mercury

You may need to adjust the path to the Mercury executable if you did not install the CSD Portfolio suite in the default location. If this does not work, then you can also try desktop instead of software in the above commands, e.g.

SET QT_OPENGL=desktop

If you wish to set this up permanently, you can run the following commands:

On Windows:

SETX QT_OPENGL=software

On Linux:

echo "export QT_OPENGL=software" >> $HOME/.bash_profile

On Linux, another option is:

export LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1

 Once you log out and back in or reboot your computer, your system should be set up to permanently disable 3D hardware acceleration for CSD Portfolio applications.