Optimize Your SOLIDWORKS Performance With These Simple Tips

The clock strikes 3 PM, and Priya Menon, a mechanical engineer at a rapidly growing aerospace startup, slams her palm on the desk. Her SOLIDWORKS assembly — a complex turbine housing with over 2,400 components — has been rebuilding for twenty-two agonizing minutes. The prototype review is tomorrow morning. Every minor modification triggers a cascade of waiting that murders her creative momentum and threatens to derail the entire project timeline.

Three cubicles away, Marcus Chen, a senior design engineer with fifteen years of CAD experience, watches his own screen with the calm patience of someone who has already solved this exact problem. His assembly? Just as complex. His rebuild time? Under ninety seconds.

Same software. Same hardware spec. Wildly different results.

If you have ever found yourself staring at a spinning cursor while SOLIDWORKS grinds through a rebuild, you already know the frustration Priya feels. The good news is that the difference between her experience and Marcus's is not luck, talent, or even budget. It is settings. Strategic, methodical optimizations that can transform SOLIDWORKS from sluggish to lightning-fast, often delivering performance improvements of 30–60% without spending a single unit of currency on new hardware.

This comprehensive guide walks you through every proven technique that thousands of engineers have used to supercharge their CAD workflows — from system-level options buried deep in menus to Windows configurations most users never think to touch.

The Status Quo: Why Your SOLIDWORKS Feels Slow

Before diving into solutions, you need to understand a critical truth that changes everything about how you approach performance.

SOLIDWORKS itself only controls roughly 20% of performance factors — bugs, algorithms, and code efficiency. The remaining 80% is entirely in your hands: how you configure your software, manage your data, plan your designs, and model your parts and assemblies.

That means blaming the software or demanding faster hardware, while sometimes justified, often misses the real culprit: suboptimal settings and modeling practices.

Think of it this way. You can have the most powerful engine in the world, but if you never change the oil, leave the parking brake on, and fill the trunk with bricks, you will lose every race to someone driving a properly maintained economy car.

Priya's workstation was a beast — high-end processor, professional GPU, 64 GB of RAM. Yet she was losing an estimated 2.5 hours per day to slow performance. Marcus, on a machine with half the specs, was running circles around her.

The difference was entirely in configuration.

Where Performance Gets Lost

Performance degradation in SOLIDWORKS comes from a complex interplay of factors that compound on each other:

The table above reveals something powerful: nearly every major performance factor is within your direct control, and most are easy to fix once you know what to look for.

The Inciting Incident: Priya Discovers the Settings Labyrinth

It happened on a Tuesday. Priya had just completed a twelve-hour modeling marathon, only to have SOLIDWORKS crash during a save operation. Twenty minutes of unsaved work — gone. When she rebooted and reopened the assembly, the load time stretched past fifteen minutes.

She walked over to Marcus's desk.

"How do you do it?" she asked, gesturing at his screen where a similarly complex assembly rotated smoothly in real time. "Same software, same type of project. Why is yours so fast?"

Marcus smiled and pulled up his System Options dialog. "Because I spent two hours configuring these settings when I first installed SOLIDWORKS. You probably never touched them."

He was right. Priya had been running SOLIDWORKS with every default setting untouched for three years. And those defaults, while safe and visually appealing, were silently consuming processing power that could have been dedicated to actual design work.

What Marcus showed her over the next week became the foundation for everything you are about to learn.

The Struggle: Understanding SOLIDWORKS Options Architecture

SOLIDWORKS options are divided into two fundamental groups, and understanding the distinction between them is the first step toward mastery:

System Options apply to SOLIDWORKS itself, independent of whatever file is open. They customize your work environment and affect any document opened on your system. These settings are not saved with a specific document.

Document Properties apply only to the currently open document and are initially set by the template used to create it. These travel with the file.

Some settings are purely user preference — cosmetic choices that make no difference to performance. But many determine the ultimate speed of your system and need to be selected with surgical precision.

Key Insight: Improved performance almost always comes at the expense of model image quality. The trick is finding the sweet spot where your models look good enough for your purposes while your system runs fast enough for productive work.

System Options: The Foundation of Speed

General Options

The General Options panel contains several settings that seem harmless but silently drain your processing power.

Settings to CLEAR (Turn Off):

• Show thumbnail graphics in Windows Explorer — Every time you browse a folder, SOLIDWORKS generates preview thumbnails for every .sldprt, .sldasm, and .slddrw file. That is processing power and CPU time stolen from your actual design work.
• Show the latest news feeds in the task pane — Network calls and rendering for news content you probably never read consume resources better spent on assembly performance.

Settings to ENABLE (Turn On):

• Enable Freeze bar — This is one of the most underutilized performance features in SOLIDWORKS. The Freeze bar prevents features in components from being rebuilt unnecessarily. When you freeze features above the bar, SOLIDWORKS skips them entirely during rebuilds, dramatically reducing rebuild times for complex parts.

Priya's reaction when she disabled thumbnail graphics was immediate. "That folder with 200 part files? It used to take eight seconds to load. Now it opens instantly."

Drawings Options

Drawing performance is where many engineers lose the most time without realizing it. SOLIDWORKS drawings involve complex view calculations that can bring even powerful systems to their knees.

Show Contents While Dragging Drawing View

When this option is enabled, SOLIDWORKS continuously updates the graphics inside drawing views as you drag them across the sheet. Every pixel of movement triggers a complete recalculation of every entity in that view.

Recommendation: CLEAR this option. The contents of the view only need to recalculate when you stop dragging, eliminating enormous amounts of real-time computation.

Allow Auto-Update When Opening Drawings

This setting automatically updates all drawing views when you open a drawing file. For complex assemblies with dozens of views, this means SOLIDWORKS must rebuild every single view before you can interact with the drawing.

Recommendation: CLEAR this option. Drawings will open significantly faster because the information in all views will not update until you explicitly rebuild the drawing. You control when the rebuild happens instead of waiting for it every time you open the file.

Automatically Hide Components on View Creation

This feature calculates the visibility of every component in every view to determine which ones are completely enclosed within other components and should be hidden. For assemblies with thousands of components, this calculation is extraordinarily expensive.

Recommendation: Let this remain OFF (it is disabled by default in Large Assembly Mode for good reason).

Save Tessellated Data for Drawings

This is a trade-off decision:

Recommendation: CLEAR this option if you rarely use view-only mode or eDrawings for drawings. The file size reduction and faster load times are worth it for most workflows.

Display Style for New Views

Recommendation: Select Draft Quality for all new drawing views. While you might expect a dramatic performance improvement, the actual gain is modest because high-quality views are processed in the background. However, every small optimization compounds.

Background Appearance

Recommendation: Change the Background appearance to Plain. Movable backgrounds must be recalculated every time the model viewpoint changes. A plain background eliminates these unnecessary calculations entirely.

Assembly Transparency for In-Context Edit

Recommendation: Set to Maintain assembly transparency. This keeps the same level of transparency throughout the editing session and avoids the intensive calculations required to dynamically adjust transparency levels.

Marcus showed Priya a before-and-after test: opening the same 150-view drawing with and without these optimizations.

"That is almost thirty seconds saved on every single drawing open," Priya said, calculating in her head. "If I open drawings twenty times a day..."

"Ten minutes a day," Marcus finished. "Fifty minutes a week. Over forty hours a year. Just from drawing settings."

Default Templates Options

When certain actions in SOLIDWORKS automatically create new documents — inserting a mirrored part, inserting a new part component, forming a new subassembly — the software needs a template.

Two Approaches:

1. Always use the default template — Saves time by eliminating extra mouse clicks and ensures the correct template is always used. Best for teams with a single standard template.
2. Prompt the user to select a template — Best when you have multiple templates for different customers, standards, or project types. Adds a click but prevents template errors.

Recommendation: If you work with a single template, set the default and forget it. If you manage multiple templates for different purposes, enable the prompt. Either way, having well-configured templates is the real performance win (more on this in Document Properties below).

Document Properties: The Hidden Performance Multiplier

Here is where Priya's education took a dramatic turn. Document Properties travel with each file, which means every part, assembly, and drawing carries its own performance configuration. If your templates are set up with poor defaults, every file you create starts life as a performance liability.

Image Quality: The Single Most Impactful Setting

This is the single most important performance setting in all of SOLIDWORKS.

The Image Quality slider controls the smoothness of curved surfaces for shaded rendering. It determines how many triangles SOLIDWORKS calculates to represent each curved surface.

Here is the critical data point that changed Priya's entire approach:

Moving the Image Quality slider from Low to High causes SOLIDWORKS to calculate over 2,500 times more triangles.

Let that sink in. Two thousand five hundred times more calculations — for triangles that are not even clearly visible to the human eye in most working scenarios. They exist solely for rendering smoothness.

Recommendation: Set the slider as far left as you can tolerate — usually two or three tick marks from the left side. This delivers a visually acceptable display while dramatically reducing the computational load.

Applying Image Quality Across Assemblies

When working in an assembly, the image quality for each component is controlled by its individual document properties. This means a single high-quality component can drag down the entire assembly's performance.

Solution: Select "Apply to all referenced part documents" to change the resolution of all individual parts to a common, optimized resolution. This ensures no single component is secretly running at maximum quality while everything else is optimized.

Save Tessellation With Part Document

Do not clear this option, even though it may seem like a quick way to reduce file size.

The tessellation data saved with each part provides essential display information for:

• View-only mode
• SOLIDWORKS Viewer
• eDrawings

Clearing this option strips the file of visualization data, creating problems for anyone who needs to view your files without fully loading them. The file size savings are not worth the lost functionality.

Add-Ins: The Silent Resource Consumers

Every SOLIDWORKS add-in that loads at startup consumes system resources — memory, CPU cycles, and sometimes network bandwidth. Many users have add-ins loaded that they use once a month or less, yet those add-ins run in the background every single session.

Marcus pulled up his Add-Ins dialog and compared it to Priya's:

Rule of Thumb: If you do not use an add-in every single session, turn it off at startup. You can always load it on demand when you need it. The few seconds it takes to manually load an add-in once are nothing compared to the drag of having it consume resources all day, every day.

Priya disabled six add-ins she rarely used. SOLIDWORKS startup time dropped from 38 seconds to 14 seconds.

Assemblies Options: Taming the Beast

Large assemblies are where performance optimization moves from "nice to have" to "mission critical." A poorly configured system working with a 2,000+ component assembly can lose hours per day to unnecessary calculations.

Large Assembly Mode

SOLIDWORKS includes a built-in feature called Large Assembly Mode that automatically adjusts multiple settings when you open an assembly exceeding a specified component threshold.

How to Configure It:

1. Set the threshold value based on the size of your typical assemblies and the capabilities of your hardware. Common starting points:
   • Entry-level workstation: 500 components
   • Mid-range workstation: 1,000 components
   • High-end workstation: 2,000 components
2. Enable Large Design Review for assemblies exceeding your threshold. This mode loads a simplified representation of the assembly, allowing you to review and navigate without fully resolving every component.

Large Assembly Mode works by disabling functions that require heavy computing power. However, keep the auto-recover feature enabled — it periodically saves your work in progress in case of unexpected crashes, and losing unsaved work in a large assembly is far more costly than the minor performance overhead of periodic saves.

Visibility Settings That Save Processing Power

Every visible entity in your assembly consumes rendering resources. Hiding unnecessary elements can significantly reduce the graphical load:

Recommendation: Select "Hide All Types" in the View menu to hide:

• Planes
• Axes
• Sketches
• Curves
• Annotations
• Reference geometry

These elements are only needed when you are actively working with them. Keeping them visible at all times wastes rendering cycles on every screen refresh.

Shaded Mode Edge Display

Calculating and rendering all the edges in a large assembly is one of the most computationally expensive display operations SOLIDWORKS performs.

Recommendation: Choose not to display edges in shaded mode. This shows components as shaded solids without edge lines, dramatically reducing the rendering workload. When you need to see edges for specific work, you can temporarily switch display modes.

Suspend Automatic Rebuilds

Every change you make in an assembly — moving a component, editing a mate, modifying a feature — triggers an automatic rebuild that recalculates the entire assembly and all its mates.

Recommendation: Suspend automatic rebuilds when making multiple changes. Make all your modifications, then perform a single manual rebuild when finished.

Caution: If an error occurs during a suspended rebuild session, troubleshooting becomes harder because you cannot pinpoint which specific change caused the problem. Use this technique when making a series of changes you are confident about, and switch back to automatic rebuilds when experimenting or debugging.

Mate Animation Speed

When SOLIDWORKS applies a mate, it can animate the component moving from its current position to its mated position, calculating every intermediate frame.

Recommendation: Turn mate animation OFF. This eliminates the calculation of intermediate positions and applies mates instantly.

External References: The Performance Trap Nobody Talks About

External References settings seem harmless — they manage how SOLIDWORKS handles links between documents. But for large assemblies with hundreds of referenced files, these settings can make or break your file opening and saving experience.

Critical External Reference Settings

That last setting — Search file locations for external references — was Priya's biggest discovery. She had left it enabled three years ago when troubleshooting a missing file issue and never turned it off.

"Every time I opened an assembly," she realized, "SOLIDWORKS was searching through six network locations for every single referenced file. Even files that were right where they should be."

Disabling it cut her assembly open time by 40%.

Performance and Image Settings: The Balancing Act

SOLIDWORKS provides a direct toggle between Performance and Image Quality settings, acknowledging that these two aspects exist on a spectrum — gains in one typically come at the expense of the other.

Verification on Rebuild

This option checks each face in a model against all other faces during a rebuild. When enabled, it provides thorough error checking. When disabled, each face is only checked against its immediate surroundings.

Recommended Workflow:

1. Turn Verification on Rebuild OFF during normal design work for maximum speed.
2. Periodically turn it ON and perform a forced rebuild (Ctrl+Q) to ensure error-free model building.
3. Turn it OFF again and continue working.

This gives you the speed of unchecked rebuilds during creative work while still catching errors through periodic verification passes.

Critical Warning: Never skip the periodic verification step. Errors that accumulate undetected in a model can cascade into catastrophic problems that are exponentially harder to fix later. Think of verification as a quality control checkpoint — you do not run it every minute, but you never skip it entirely.

Transparency Settings

Accurately displaying what lies behind transparent surfaces requires SOLIDWORKS to order and render the model precisely, considering front faces, back faces, and color interactions.

Recommendation: Use lower-quality transparency for all daily work. Reserve high-quality transparency for presentations and final reviews.

Lightweight Components

Lightweight components load only a subset of their data into memory, dramatically reducing assembly load times and memory consumption.

Key Lightweight Settings:

• Automatically load lightweight components: Enable this if you frequently work on assemblies below the large assembly threshold but need only a few components fully resolved.
• Level of detail slider: Move this to the far right. This converts smaller components to simplified blocks during movement operations (panning, zooming, rotating) and restores full detail when movement stops. The visual impact during motion is negligible, but the performance gain is significant.
• Always resolve sub-assemblies: Keep this UNCHECKED. If enabled, sub-assemblies automatically resolve when the top-level assembly opens, eliminating the benefits of opening the assembly lightweight.
• Check out-of-date lightweight components: Set to "Indicate" to flag out-of-date components in the FeatureManager design tree without automatically resolving them. This lets you update only the components you need.
• Resolve lightweight components: Set to "Always" only when performing tasks that specifically require fully resolved components.
• Rebuild assembly on load: Set to "Always" to ensure you are never working with out-of-date geometry.

OpenGL Settings

Recommendation: Leave "Use software OpenGL" unchecked unless your video card does not meet SOLIDWORKS requirements. Software OpenGL rendering is dramatically slower than hardware-accelerated rendering, and the performance gap grows exponentially as assembly size increases.

If your graphics card is not on the SOLIDWORKS certified list, upgrading the card is almost always a better investment than running in software mode.

Preview During Open

Recommendation: Select "No Preview During Open" to dedicate all available memory and processing power to actually loading the file rather than generating a preview image. The preview adds visual polish to the opening experience but provides no functional value while consuming resources that could speed up the loading process.

View Options: Where Appearance Meets Performance

View Transitions

View transitions create smooth animated movements between different viewpoints — visually impressive for presentations, but a constant drain on processing power during design work.

Recommendation: Set view transitions to Off. Every transition requires SOLIDWORKS to calculate intermediate positions and transparencies, processing power that is better invested in your actual design work.

Auto-Recover: The Controversial Setting

Auto-recover periodically saves backup copies of your open files. This is fundamentally a safety feature that protects against crashes and power failures.

The Trade-Off:

Recommendation: If you have disciplined save habits (saving after every significant change), turn Auto-Recover OFF and save manually when it suits your workflow. If you tend to get absorbed in work and forget to save, keep it ON — the interruptions are less costly than lost work.

Marcus's approach: "I save after every successful operation I would not want to repeat. Auto-recover is off. My workflow is never interrupted."

Priya's initial approach: "I would go an hour without saving, then get frustrated when auto-recover kicked in during a complex operation."

After adopting Marcus's discipline, Priya turned off auto-recover and never lost work again.

File Explorer Locations

Recommendation: Only select the folder locations you frequently access. Every configured location in File Explorer must be read and populated each time you open the tab. Unnecessary locations waste time on directory reads that add no value to your workflow.

Indexing Performance

SOLIDWORKS indexes files to enable faster searching. This indexing process consumes CPU and disk resources.

Recommendation: Select "Index only when computer is idle" to ensure indexing never competes with your active design work. If scheduled maintenance or defragmentation is configured, ensure it runs during non-working hours.

The Transformation: Windows-Level Optimization

Marcus's mentorship took Priya beyond SOLIDWORKS settings into the operating system itself. "SOLIDWORKS runs on Windows," he said. "If Windows is slow, SOLIDWORKS is slow. Period."

Windows Visual Effects

Modern Windows operating systems include numerous visual effects — transparency, animations, shadows, smooth scrolling — that enhance the aesthetic experience while consuming GPU and CPU resources.

Key Windows Settings to Address:

• Aero / Desktop Window Manager effects — These create translucent window borders, peek previews, and animation effects. Every frame of these animations competes with SOLIDWORKS for GPU resources.
• ClearType text rendering — Improves text readability on LCD screens. This one is worth keeping for most users as the performance impact is minimal and the readability benefit is real.
• Windows Search indexing — If you rarely use Windows Search, disabling it frees up disk I/O and CPU cycles.
• Menu and cursor effects (pointer shadows, cascading menu animations, tooltip animations) — These are pure visual polish with zero productivity benefit.

Recommendation: Navigate to System Properties → Advanced → Performance Settings and select "Adjust for best performance" rather than "Adjust for best appearance" or "Let Windows choose."

The general rule: if a setting makes the display look better without adding functionality, it is consuming resources that could be better used for SOLIDWORKS performance.

System Maintenance

Your operating system and storage hardware need regular maintenance to perform at their best. Neglected maintenance creates a compounding performance tax that grows worse over time.

Essential Maintenance Schedule:

Important: Before installing any service pack, review the release notes to confirm it addresses issues relevant to your workflow. An updated service pack that fixes your specific problems is worth installing immediately. A service pack that does not address your issues can sometimes introduce new ones — though staying current is generally the safer approach.

For SSD Users: Skip disk defragmentation entirely. SSDs do not benefit from defragmentation and the process can reduce the drive's lifespan. SSD performance maintenance focuses on ensuring adequate free space (at least 10-15% of total capacity) and keeping firmware updated.

Running Other Programs: The Resource Competition

Your computer has finite resources — RAM, CPU cycles, disk I/O bandwidth, and GPU capacity. Every running program competes for these resources.

The Rule: When using SOLIDWORKS for serious design work, your computer should be solely dedicated to that task.

This means shutting down:

• Music players and streaming services
• Image and video editors
• Web browsers with many open tabs (each tab consumes RAM)
• Communication tools that are not immediately needed
• Cloud sync services that perform background file uploads
• Any application not directly related to your current design task

"But I need my music to focus," Priya protested.

Marcus pointed at her system monitor. "Your music player and the ten browser tabs you have open are consuming 3 GB of RAM and 8% of your CPU. That is memory and processing power SOLIDWORKS could be using to keep your assemblies responsive."

Priya started using a separate device for music. Her assembly rotation went from stuttery to smooth overnight.

Virus Protection: Security Without Sacrifice

Virus protection is non-negotiable in any professional environment. Unprotected systems risk data loss, file corruption, and costly downtime. However, poorly configured virus protection can bring SOLIDWORKS to its knees.

Understanding Scan Types

The problem with real-time scanning is that SOLIDWORKS accesses hundreds or thousands of files when opening a large assembly. If your virus scanner inspects every one of those files in real time, you are adding a scan operation to every single file access.

Recommended Configuration:

1. Schedule comprehensive scans during non-working hours (overnight, weekends).
2. Use on-demand scans when you receive files from external vendors or download from the internet.
3. Configure real-time scanning to exclude SOLIDWORKS file types (.sldprt, .sldasm, .slddrw) and your SOLIDWORKS working directories. Most enterprise antivirus solutions support folder and file-type exclusions.
4. Never disable virus protection entirely. The risk of infection, data loss, and computer reformatting far outweighs any performance gain.

For IT Administrators: Create a SOLIDWORKS-specific antivirus policy that excludes CAD working directories from real-time scanning while maintaining full protection for email, downloads, and web browsing. This gives engineers maximum performance without compromising security.

SOLIDWORKS Rx: Your Built-In Performance Doctor

SOLIDWORKS includes a diagnostic and maintenance tool called SOLIDWORKS Rx that many users never discover. It provides automated system analysis and maintenance capabilities in a single interface.

The Diagnostics Tab

Running the Diagnostics function causes SOLIDWORKS Rx to examine your system configuration and SOLIDWORKS settings, comparing them against best practices. The results highlight specific issues that should be fixed, often identifying performance drains you did not know existed.

What Diagnostics Checks:

• Graphics card driver compatibility and version
• System resource availability (RAM, disk space)
• SOLIDWORKS settings that deviate from performance best practices
• Operating system configuration issues
• Known compatibility problems with installed software

The System Maintenance Tab

This tab provides a centralized location to run multiple maintenance tasks simultaneously:

• Clean out temporary files from multiple locations
• Run Windows checkdisk on hard drives
• Run Disk Defragmenter on multiple drives (HDD only)
• Clear SOLIDWORKS-specific cache files

Scheduling Options:

The scheduled option integrates with Windows Task Scheduler for fine-grained control over when maintenance runs.

Marcus ran SOLIDWORKS Rx diagnostics quarterly. "It always finds something," he said. "A driver update I missed, a temp folder that grew to 8 GB, a setting that got changed by an update. It takes five minutes to check and can save you hours of frustration."

Saving Your Settings: Protecting Your Investment

You have now invested significant time analyzing and optimizing your SOLIDWORKS configuration. Protect that investment.

System Options: Copy Settings Wizard

System Options are saved as registry files. The Copy Settings Wizard allows you to:

1. Save your current system options, keyboard shortcuts, menu customizations, and toolbar layouts.
2. Restore saved settings after a reinstallation, system migration, or accidental change.
3. Deploy your optimized settings to other workstations in your team.

Access: Start → All Programs → SOLIDWORKS Tools → Copy Settings Wizard

Recommendation: Save your settings immediately after completing your optimization. Save again after any intentional changes. Store the backup file on a network drive or cloud location so it survives local hardware failures.

Document Properties: Template Files

Document Properties are stored within template files. This is why creating well-optimized templates is one of the highest-return time investments you can make in SOLIDWORKS.

A good template includes:

• Optimized Image Quality settings (slider 2-3 ticks from left)
• Appropriate units and standards for your work
• Custom properties configured for your project management needs
• Standard reference geometry (planes, coordinate systems)
• Start geometry for common part types (if applicable)
• Correct annotation standards for your industry
• Optimized performance-related document properties

Template Best Practice Table:

"I spent one afternoon creating five templates," Marcus told Priya. "One for each of our major project types. That afternoon has saved me hundreds of hours over three years."

The Complete Performance Optimization Checklist

Here is every optimization from this guide, organized as an actionable checklist you can work through systematically.

SOLIDWORKS System Options

• [ ] General: Clear "Show thumbnail graphics in Windows Explorer"
• [ ] General: Clear "Show latest news feeds in task pane"
• [ ] General: Enable "Freeze bar"
• [ ] Drawings: Clear "Show contents while dragging drawing view"
• [ ] Drawings: Clear "Allow auto-update when opening drawings"
• [ ] Drawings: Verify "Automatically hide components on view creation" is OFF
• [ ] Drawings: Evaluate tessellated data settings for your workflow
• [ ] Drawings: Set Display Style to "Draft quality" for new views
• [ ] Drawings: Set Background appearance to "Plain"
• [ ] Drawings: Set Assembly transparency to "Maintain assembly transparency"
• [ ] Default Templates: Configure default template or prompt setting based on your workflow
• [ ] Add-Ins: Disable all add-ins not used every session

SOLIDWORKS Document Properties (Set in Templates)

• [ ] Image Quality: Set slider 2-3 ticks from left
• [ ] Image Quality: Enable "Apply to all referenced part documents"
• [ ] Tessellation: Keep "Save tessellation with part document" ENABLED
• [ ] Save optimized templates for all project types

SOLIDWORKS Assemblies Options

• [ ] Large Assembly Mode: Set threshold appropriate for your hardware
• [ ] Large Design Review: Enable with appropriate toggle value
• [ ] Visibility: Select "Hide All Types" for planes, axes, sketches, etc.
• [ ] Display: Disable edges in shaded mode for large assemblies
• [ ] Rebuilds: Consider suspending automatic rebuilds for batch changes
• [ ] Mate Animation: Turn OFF

SOLIDWORKS External References

• [ ] Set referenced documents to open with read-only access
• [ ] Disable prompt to save read-only referenced documents
• [ ] Set "Load referenced documents" to Prompt
• [ ] Disable "Search file locations for external references" (unless troubleshooting)

SOLIDWORKS Performance Settings

• [ ] Verification on rebuild: OFF for daily work (periodic Ctrl+Q checks)
• [ ] Transparency: Set to lower quality for daily design work
• [ ] Lightweight loading: Configure based on typical assembly size
• [ ] Level of detail: Slider to far right
• [ ] Always resolve sub-assemblies: UNCHECKED
• [ ] Check out-of-date lightweight: Set to "Indicate"
• [ ] Rebuild assembly on load: Set to "Always"
• [ ] Mate animation speed: OFF
• [ ] Software OpenGL: UNCHECKED (unless required by hardware)
• [ ] No Preview During Open: SELECTED

SOLIDWORKS View & Other Options

• [ ] View transitions: Set to OFF
• [ ] Auto-recover: OFF (if you save frequently) or ON (if you prefer safety net)
• [ ] File Explorer: Only select frequently-used locations
• [ ] Indexing: Set to "Index only when computer is idle"

Windows Operating System

• [ ] Set Performance Options to "Adjust for best performance"
• [ ] Disable unnecessary visual effects
• [ ] Disable Windows Search indexing (if rarely used)
• [ ] Schedule defragmentation during non-working hours (HDD only)
• [ ] Clear temporary and backup files regularly
• [ ] Uninstall unused applications
• [ ] Clean Windows Registry periodically
• [ ] Install latest service packs after reviewing release notes

Resource Management

• [ ] Close all unnecessary applications during CAD work
• [ ] Configure virus protection to exclude SOLIDWORKS files from real-time scanning
• [ ] Schedule virus scans during non-working hours

Maintenance & Backup

• [ ] Run SOLIDWORKS Rx Diagnostics quarterly
• [ ] Use SOLIDWORKS Rx System Maintenance monthly
• [ ] Save system options via Copy Settings Wizard
• [ ] Back up template files to a secure location

The Takeaway: Priya's Transformation

Six weeks after her first conversation with Marcus, Priya's SOLIDWORKS environment was unrecognizable.

Her 2,400-component turbine housing assembly now opened in under two minutes instead of fifteen. Rebuilds that used to take twenty-two minutes completed in under ninety seconds. Drawing operations were smooth and responsive. She stopped losing work to crashes because her optimized system ran stable all day.

But the biggest change was not in the software. It was in her.

"I used to think performance was about hardware," Priya said during a team lunch. "That if my assembly was slow, I needed a bigger machine. Now I understand that performance is about configuration. About knowing where every setting is and exactly what it costs you."

She had gone from blaming the software to mastering it. From reactive frustration to proactive optimization. From losing 2.5 hours a day to gaining them back.

And here is what matters most for you: every single optimization Priya implemented is available to you right now, today, in your current SOLIDWORKS installation, on your current hardware, at zero cost.

You do not need a bigger budget. You do not need a new workstation. You do not need to wait for the next SOLIDWORKS release. You need two hours and this checklist.

The gap between a frustrating SOLIDWORKS experience and a fast one is not hardware. It is knowledge. And now you have it.

Your Next Move

Open SOLIDWORKS right now. Go to Tools → Options → System Options. Start at the top of the checklist above and work your way down. Set a timer — most engineers complete the full optimization in under two hours.

Before you start: Use the Copy Settings Wizard to save your current settings as a backup. If any change does not work for your specific workflow, you can restore your previous configuration instantly.

After you finish: Save your new settings with the Copy Settings Wizard. Create or update your templates with optimized Document Properties. Share this guide with your engineering team — a team that runs at full speed is exponentially more productive than one engineer working alone on a slow machine.

What was the single biggest performance improvement you discovered? Drop a comment below — your experience might help another engineer escape the same frustration.

SOLIDWORKS 2025/2026 brings additional performance enhancements including AI-powered drawing automation, faster assembly mass property calculations, improved SpeedPak configurations, and smarter rebuild handling. The optimization principles in this guide apply across all SOLIDWORKS versions, and combining them with the latest version's improvements delivers the best possible experience.

BRICKWAY— Solving Design Challenges, Line by Line.