After installing AutoCAD 2015 on a year-old Dell Laptop, a customer had trouble enabling the hardware acceleration – even though he had an NVidia Quadro 1000M graphics card and the latest drivers. First I checked the Optimus dual NVidia graphics card settings in the NVidia control panel and I made sure the Global Setting was set to High Performance VGA Card.

I also double checked that AutoCAD used the High Performance Card, although this did not make any difference.

AutoCAD read the Quadro card but still used the hdi software drivers.

I checked the service packs. Windows 7 Service Pack1 and AutoCAD 2015 SP0 was installed. So I installed AutoCAD service pack 2. Rebooted. No luck. Still the Hdi driver. I then Installed the Certified NVidia drivers from the “Autodesk certified hardware site” for the Quadro and they did not work. Here is the link: http://www.autodesk.com/graphics-hardware

I then repaired/reinstalled AutoCAD 2015, but that also did not work. I rebooted between each task and also checked that AutoCAD Sp2 is still installed.

After searching the internet, I downloaded and reinstalled DirectX11. I also checked via Dxdiag.exe that the Quadro is DX11 compatible – which it was.

On the forums they mentioned a couple of Windows System settings to make AutoCAD work with Dx9 instead of Dx11.

These settings enabled the Hardware Acceleration for AutoCAD.

I do think that on some laptops/graphics cards there might be a compatibility issue with AutoCAD 2015 and DX11. By allowing AutoCAD 2015 to use DX9, the problem of getting AutoCAD to enable Hardware Acceleration is solved.