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Hacking the Nvidia performance driver (powerdraft) into Civil 3D

Several months ago, Nvidia released a performance driver for AutoCAD 2009. Unfortunately, using the included installer, this driver can only be installed on AutoCAD. When you only have Civil 3D installed, you get an error which reads, “Setup was unable to find an installed version of AutoCAD 2009.”

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I was able to hack the driver in to my Civil 3D 2009 installation on an XP (32) system by doing the following:

  1. Download Powerdraft2009_XP_Vista_32_64.exe from nvidia’s website.
  2. Run the install program and let it error out as noted above.
  3. At this point the install program has actually unpacked the archive to a directory called C:\04-28-2008-0710\ navigate to C:\04-28-2008-0710\Disk1\win32 and copy all of the files from that location to C:\Program Files\AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009\Drv
  4. Finally, back in Civil 3D, run 3DCONFIG and select the new Nvidia specific driver for either Direct3D or OpenGL.

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Unfortunately, since I don’t have a supported video card on my notebook, I haven’t had the opportunity to test this workaround with Civil 3D 2009 (a 32 bit application) on Vista x64.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 11:53 and is filed under AutoCAD Civil 3D - Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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