problem as seen in picture, I have tried entirely uninstalling and reinstalling KiCad, I have uninstalled and reinstalled graphics drivers in the past.
I tried updating my graphics drivers by finding on dell website driver installer for AMD FirePro M4000, but when I tried to install it said install failed. Windows update also doesn’t find graphics drivers, and I can’t figure out any way to tell my computer to use CPU as GPU for KiCad to further test if the problem is drivers or not. Version of OpenGL is 25.20.15000.13547, I can’t find what the current version is.
I have no other ideas what the problem could be. Raytracing works, but is way too slow for almost any purpose.
Unfortunately there is no realtime software renderer mode in the 3D viewer. If you cannot get OpenGL to work on your computer, raytracing is the only option.
Just to be sure - did it ever work? It’s easy to set some preferences in the 3D viewer and forget them. There’s Reset to Default Settings in Preferences menu which helps in that case.
There was a bug report somewhere that I can’t find right now about AMD graphics cards. The solution was to modify some of the driver settings in the AMD control panel. You might play around there to see if it works for you as well.
It worked in the past on this computer, I have done nothing to break it. I have tried reset to default setting and messing around with KiCad settings a lot.
EDIT: I have no idea how it opened, but I also found settings for saturation / contrast / hue, but they also did not help unless it requires specific values.
EDIT: Nevermind, I managed to find settings by clicking on a the profile instead of clicking on the … of the profile. Tried changing one at a time and nothing helped.
Sorry for spamming so many replies, but I think I solved it, it seems to be a combination of some problem with the .kicad_pcb file and some other problem.
I copied and pasted everything from the problematic .kicad_pcb file into a new .kicad_pcb file, renamed it the same as my old and put overwrote the old; now it seems to work, but only if I open the .kicad_pcb file from whatever the launcher is called.
Other .kicad_pcb files 3d viewer works fine without using the launcher, but not this for some reason. (but there is for sure some other prolbem than launcher, since even with launcher I was having same problem before copying contents of the board to a new .kicad_pcb file)
EDIT: this is not a real solution as it all vias lose their nets.
EDIT: I have no idea what is happening, I restored backups and now it works fine. I had been not working for a long time, but now I think the only thing different is that I updated KiCad, though immediately after updating KiCad (full uninstall and reinstall) it still didn’t work, but seems to now.
