SOLIDWORKS RealView – For Everyone: Enabling RealView on Non-Certified Graphics Cards #SOLIDWORKS

I’ve never really been a heavy user of RealView Graphics in SOLIDWORKS.

For those who aren’t familiar: RealView Graphics is a hardware-accelerated display mode, supporting things like advanced shaders, self-shadows, and scene reflections. It's actually the “scene reflections” part that’s one of the main reasons I rarely turn RealView on when I’m modeling—selected faces get washed out, sometimes flicker, and the overall reflected surfaces end up so bright that staring at the screen for too long just wears me out.

But there’s one area where RealView is absolutely essential: working with certain SOLIDWORKS appearances. A whole bunch of appearances only display properly if RealView is enabled. Without it, those appearances just show up as flat, boring slabs of color—which makes tweaking them pretty much impossible.

You could use PhotoView 360’s preview to check and adjust appearances, but rendering is resource-hungry and, honestly, it’s slow.

Here’s the catch: RealView is only available on graphics cards certified by SOLIDWORKS.

There’s a lot of debate about whether you should use a certified card; and sure, if you’re doing commercial work, it definitely makes sense to seriously consider one. But the reality is, there are just too many types of computers out there these days—especially with the explosion of hybrid devices like the Microsoft Surface, Dell XPS, and so on. My own personal machine is an HP Spectre x360, which I use for running beta versions, doing user group demos, and just learning SOLIDWORKS for myself.

Most of these devices use integrated graphics cards that aren’t certified, which means RealView Graphics is nowhere to be found. The reason’s actually pretty simple: these cards just aren’t written into the Windows registry. In other words, there’s a dead-simple way to enable RealView in SOLIDWORKS and get all its benefits.

And that way is: manually add your graphics card to the registry!

People always warn you to be careful mucking about in the registry, but honestly, I’ve never had a problem adding entries—especially not with the steps I’m about to share.

Here’s how you add your card to the registry:

First, open Device Manager. There are a bunch of ways to do this in Windows 10, but the easiest is to hit the Windows icon or Cortana search, then type “Device Manager.” Once it’s open, expand “Display adapter” and note down your graphics card's name.

Next, open up the Registry Editor (Regedit). Same deal: just search for it from the Windows icon or Cortana.

Now, navigate to:

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SolidWorks\SOLIDWORKS 2018\Performance\Graphics\Hardware\Gl2Shaders

If you’re not on SOLIDWORKS 2018, just go to the folder for your version.

Select and expand the Gl2Shaders folder. You’ll see a bunch of subfolders—these are the already-certified graphics cards. Each folder corresponds to a brand and series of certified cards. You want to find the folder that’s the closest match for your own card. For the HP Spectre x360, it’s an Intel integrated HD card, and I found that Intel cards are lumped under the “Other” folder.

Right-click the appropriate folder (for me, that’s “Other”), choose “New” – “Key.” Name this new key exactly as your graphics card appears in Device Manager—spaces and all (mine’s Intel(R) HD Graphics 620).

Right-click the graphics card key you just made, choose “New” – “DWORD (32-bit) Value.” Name this DWORD: Workarounds.

Then right-click on Workarounds and select “Modify.” I always leave the hexadecimal value at 0. If you’re adding an NVIDIA or AMD card that’s similar but not already listed, you might want to check what value is set for a closely related model and use that.

Close the Registry Editor, fire up SOLIDWORKS! At this point, RealView Graphics should show up and be ready to activate.

One thing, though: since you’re adding this entry manually, you’ll need to redo these steps every time you install a Service Pack update.