BricsCAD Forum

The installer for BricsCAD for Windows 7.0 Pro (and probably Classic) appears to lock up during the install, right after you dismiss the pop-up notice about purchasing a license before VBA will work. The problem is actually that a small window asking for your user and company name fails to pop up above the main installer window and can't be brought forward. If you slide the main install window away from the center of the screen before this step, you can bypass this issue.

The application appears to work ok in the program's "model space" tab (cad users will know what this means), although the graphics engine is very slow when zooming and panning, probably due to no support for hardware acceleration in wine. It's even worse in paper space viewports, to the point of being unusable in a production environment. (this is on a reasonably-fast system, 2.8 Ghz P4, lots of memory and an low-end ATI video card) Note that this is mainly a performance issue; the application does work, open DWG files, render 3D, etc.

On-line help appears to be partially broken: It brings up the window, allows you to search and browse the topic index, but fails to bring up the topics themselves. I haven't tested LISP or VBA scripts yet.

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Note: The folks at BricsCAD do have a winelib-based linux version for their 6.0 product. However, it is supported only on Red Hat and Suse; I've had no luck installing their linux product on Ubuntu Dapper 6 LTS; hence the testing of the 7.0 product with wine.

After some reading in the wikis and newsgroups at winehq.com, I think that the performance issues within BricsCAD are most certainly related to "DIB Engine" issues (Wine bug 421), as the graphics operations described in the bug report are exactly what you encounter in CAD applications:

http://wiki.winehq.org/DIBEngine
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=421

I notice that basic editing in model space pegs a "wine-preloader" process to about 80%. Working in paper space pegs the "xorg" process to 80-90% of the processor. This would be consistent with the "DIB engine" problem described in the above link. Working in paper space requires updating multiple viewports, which are most likely multiple bitmap buffers in the bricscad code.

I therefore suspect that the graphics performance issues I have noted are probably due to numerous blit-copies from the X-server back into the wine bitmap structure for each and every item (line, pixel, arc, etc) drawn by the cad application.