Specify user preferences.
Engine - Choose the rendering engine that is used to create displays.
Basic, Software - Use software rendering only. Does not support antialiasing and other advanced rendering features.
Advanced, Software - Supports antialiasing. GPU is used only for very basic tasks such as antialiasing. Used to work around temporary issues with video drivers or other software or for specialized scenarios such as software development or to get around problems with Terminal Server or Remote Desktop.
Advanced, hardware acceleration allowed - The default. Supports antialiasing. GPU is used whenever it makes sense. Can render screens visibly faster than software engines.
Hardware acceleration in the above using GPU is not parallel computation as described in the GPGPU topic. Instead, it is simply using a GPU for faster graphics rendering. GPGPU computational parallelism requires a reasonably recent NVIDIA GPU; however, using a GPU for faster graphics works with almost all GPUs (AMD, Intel, NVIDIA) that are supported by Microsoft Windows for graphics rendering.
Default coordinate system for new components - Choose the coordinate system that will be used when a new, blank component is created or when a component is imported from a format that does not provide projection information.
WGS 84 / Pseudo-Mercator (EPSG:3857) is the default, the same coordinate system used by most web servers (Google, Bing, OSM, etc.). The star favorites button and [...] browse button are the same as used in the Change Coordinate System dialog.
Status Bar - Specify information shown in the status bar when moving the mouse cursor over a window.
Show native coordinates - Show the internal coordinates used by the data unadjusted for Local Scale and Local Offset.
Show projected coordinates - Show the internal coordinates used by the data as fully projected using all projection parameters, including Local Scale and Local Offset. For example, when viewing a data set in Mercator the projected coordinates will be in units of meters.
Show latitude / longitude - Show the current latitude and longitude position of the cursor using degrees as units.
Native coordinates will be the same as projected coordinates in all cases where Local Scale is 1 and Local Offset is 0. Those two parameters normally will change only for images and not for drawings.
Default coordinate system - Newer software like ESRI's ArcGIS Pro and Manifold tend to use Pseudo-Mercator as a default coordinate system because that is the coordinate system almost universally used by web servers. In modern times web servers have become a dominant source of data for base maps and backgrounds for custom maps. Using Pseudo-Mercator also ensures that measurements tend to make sense because the units of measure are genuine linear units such as meters.
Older software like Manifold Release 8 and QGIS tend to use Latitude / Longitude as the default coordinate system for new components. That made sense in a day when shapefiles could not be relied upon to convey projection information, and it also makes sense as a "one step" conversion of geocoded tables giving locations in latitude / longitude degrees into drawings.
But using Latitude / Longitude requires a slight mental hack when displaying drawings because degrees are angular units, not linear units as a rectangular drawing implies. We are buying into a conceptual lapse by using angular units in such a setting and that can easily trip us up, for example, by how the unit of measure, degrees, expands and contracts as we move north and south.
If we are going to be doing a lot of work with data from older software in older formats where we know it is almost all going to be in latitude / longitude with no projection information provided, then it may make sense to switch the default coordinate system to Latitude / Longitude.