AutoCAD Tip – Graphical glitches with busy drawing? Turn off Hardware Acceleration!

By Dennis Collin

When working with certain complex drawings, graphical glitching can sometimes be apparent especially when complex blocks with hatching are concerned. The problem often disappears and/or reappears when zooming in, zooming out or changing the view angle, but the presence of such elements can be somewhat disconcerting to your typical AutoCAD user. Other symptoms include ghosted lines, parallel line artifacts when elements are in fact exactly on top of one another.

This rather annoying issue seems to be more common in recent versions of AutoCAD, especially the 2022 release. This is likely due to the ‘improved’ display engine, support for 4K monitors and DirectX 12. Fortunately, the problem is easy to address. Users can simply turn off hardware acceleration mode! This can be achieved via the options menu, system tab.

Under the graphics performance dialogue set the switch to software mode, click OK and apply and hopefully the visual artifacts disappear.