Trick: enable RealView for Solidworks 2017

By searched for hours, someone else (who named Nikki.H if my memory is right) gave the old trick, which is also used by RealHack tool: using regedit.exe to edit registry, adding your graphics key and setting the right value, if lucky, you will have the realview.

The registry key is :
HKLU\Software\Solidworks\Solidworks 2017\Performance\Graphics\Hardware\Gl2Shaders

The value is Workarounds, data type is dword.

The most important thing is the mode of your graphics card. A handy way is just viewing SolidWorks Resource Monitor, you can find your card model. For example, with VMWare 3D acceleration, the card model could be “Gallium 0.4 on SVGA3D;Build xxx;Blahblahblah“. The right description of card model should be Gallium 0.4 on SVGA3D, the string between beginning and first semi-colon.

Now open registry, add new key under HKLU\Software\Solidworks\Solidworks 2017\Performance\Graphics\Hardware\Gl2Shaders\Other, name will be your card model, for me, Gallium 0.4 on SVGA3D, then create the value Workarounds with data 0.

Keeping registry opened, run Solidworks and check if you have the RealView option. If you have it, just close registyr and have fun. If not, close Solidworks*, try different data for Workarounds, such as 0, 1, 20408, 21408, 30408, 31408, 40408, or 41408, etc, all in hex. After updating, reopen **Solidworks and check again.

If you view other keys under Gl2shaders, you will find a lot of potential data for Workarounds, just try. It harmless, you and your machine will survive.

One odd thing is, looks like my GeForce doesn’t work. After thousands tries, it always flashes black screen, dithers the screen and goes back to normal with very low performance, even worse than software openGL. Howover, my embedded Intel card works very well.

Appended: Dec/10-2016:
Out of luck! My old Asus Q200E, which has an Intel HD Graphics 3000, couldn’t open realView. SW always gets GDI Generic card model and hides realView!

Appended:Aug/1/2017
For Nvidia card, a proved way is add new key under NV40. For example: my surface book has a Geforce GTX 965M, the Solidworks Resource prober will give a value of Geforce GTX 965M/SSE/PCI_e, so the key name will be Geforce GTX 965M. A valid value for Workarounds is 0x30008. This trick works on my desktop PC which has a GTX 670 too.

Good luck!