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Getting Started
After installing Simcenter STAR-CCM+, you can access documentation and tutorials on the Support Center or within the installation.
Troubleshooting Graphics
This section provides techniques for dealing with the following visualization problems:
Working Without Graphics Hardware
When hardware-accelerated drivers are not available on your machine, or when you must run Simcenter STAR-CCM+ remotely through an X-server (such as VNC), you can activate Mesa graphics libraries.

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Getting Started
After installing Simcenter STAR-CCM+, you can access documentation and tutorials on the Support Center or within the installation.
- Context-Sensitive Search
  From within the Simcenter STAR-CCM+ interface, you can launch a combined search of the resources available in the Support Center and the online help. The resources include knowledge base articles and videos and submissions on Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Ideas.
- Accessing Help
  The Simcenter STAR-CCM+ documentation is provided in two formats, HTML and PDF. The PDF file can be found within the doc directory of your Simcenter STAR-CCM+ installation.
- Digital Product Experience
  To enable users to benefit from our personalized Digital Product Experience the collection of personalized data is necessary.
- Product Excellence Program
  Siemens Digital Industries Software collects information about the use of our offerings by its users. This information helps us to improve our product features and functionality to better meet our customers’ needs.
- General Simulation Process
  Simcenter STAR-CCM+ provides you with a simulation tool that allows you to test solution designs under virtual conditions. Although Simcenter STAR-CCM+ supports a wide range of modeling scenarios, there is a general workflow that you can follow in most situations.
- Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Licensing
  Simcenter STAR-CCM+ is licensed software that operates according to license feature keys that it checks out from the license management system. Apart from the default mode, you can launch Simcenter STAR-CCM+ in Read-only Mode, Lite, Power Session, and Power on Demand.
- Getting Support
  When you need assistance with using Simcenter STAR-CCM+, you can first check for resources on the Support Center.
- Suggesting Enhancements to Simcenter STAR-CCM+
  Siemens Digital Industries Software provides an area on the Simcenter STAR-CCM+ community forum where you can submit ideas for enhancing the software. The forum also allows you to comment on ideas from other users.
- Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Default Options
  The Options dialog is used to control a number of global options in Simcenter STAR-CCM+. The choices you make are stored in a properties folder that is unique for each version of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ you run on your machine.
- Controlling Graphics Performance
  Simcenter STAR-CCM+ offers various options for using graphics software and hardware for your simulation.
- Rendering Graphics Locally and Remotely
  By default, when you launch a Simcenter STAR-CCM+ server from a batch or interactive client on the same local machine, Simcenter STAR-CCM+ renders graphics in the client using the local graphics resources. Alternative rendering options are provided that provide better performance in different circumstances, including standalone rendering processes.
- Troubleshooting Graphics
  This section provides techniques for dealing with the following visualization problems:
  - Resolving Hardware Issues
    If you experience problems in displaying graphics within the Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Graphics window, install the latest driver for your graphics hardware. The process for obtaining and installing the latest driver depends on your graphics hardware. Refer to the manufacturer's instructions for details.
  - Working Without Graphics Hardware
    When hardware-accelerated drivers are not available on your machine, or when you must run Simcenter STAR-CCM+ remotely through an X-server (such as VNC), you can activate Mesa graphics libraries.
  - Mouse Pointer Positioning in 3D-CAD
    When using 3D-CAD on a virtual machine, you may experience an offset between the mouse position and your object selection. To resolve this issue, you can adjust the User Interface Scale.
  - A Scene Will Not Open
    If you are unable to open a scene, you can obtain information for troubleshooting.
  - Improving the Rendering of Concave Faces
    Some objects with highly non-planar polygons show artifacts. This problem is because Simcenter STAR-CCM+ attempts to triangulate these kinds of surfaces--a process that requires extra memory.
  - Z-Fighting Appears
    The model shows rear polygons “bleeding” from behind the front ones.
  - Limitations for High-DPI Displays
    Automatic scaling of UI elements on high-DPI displays (such as 4K) is not supported in the current release of Simcenter STAR-CCM+. If you wish to use such a display, use workarounds such as deactivating scaling to improve display quality of the user interface.
- Product Security
  Simcenter STAR-CCM+ is an analysis code that is designed to work within a secure network with trusted users.
- Credits

Working Without Graphics Hardware

When hardware-accelerated drivers are not available on your machine, or when you must run Simcenter STAR-CCM+ remotely through an X-server (such as VNC), you can activate Mesa graphics libraries.

The Mesa graphics libraries provide software rendering without requiring hardware acceleration. Graphics performance is much slower when using Mesa than when using graphics hardware with up-to-date hardware-accelerated drivers. A newer Mesa driver (OpenSWR) is available that provides much better performance than the legacy driver (LLVMpipe), particularly when running with multiple render threads. As OpenSWR requires support of the AVX instruction set in the CPU (which is available on all CPUs released after 2012), the legacy Mesa driver is still included.

Simcenter STAR-CCM+ automatically checks for the presence of hardware acceleration and falls back to software rendering when none is found. The graphics checker selects the OpenSWR Mesa driver when no hardware acceleration is available and the CPU supports it.

To explicitly force the use of software rendering with Mesa OpenGL, use either of the following command line options when launching Simcenter STAR-CCM+:

For the Simcenter STAR-CCM+ client: -graphics mesa or -graphics mesa_swr
For the Simcenter STAR-CCM+ server (remote rendering): -rgraphics mesa or -rgraphics mesa_swr
Note You can use this command for a dedicated rendering server (see Rendering Graphics on a Remote Server).

To increase responsiveness:

Select Tools > Options. In the Options dialog that appears, open the Options and STAR-CCM+ nodes, and select the Visualization node.
Increase the Refresh Rate property.
This adjustment demotes surfaces to a simpler representation (and hence drawn faster) when interaction occurs in the scene.

Limitations of Software Rendering with Mesa

Software rendering is known to be much slower than hardware rendering. Consequently, you are strongly advised to run Simcenter STAR-CCM+ with hardware rendering whenever graphics hardware is present.