Slow Regen in ACA 2015 Compared to 2014

[Anonymous]

I just started testing AutoCAD Architecture 2015 and one problem has cropped up that I can't seem to figure out (aside from the bottom horizontal scroll bar not showing, which others have already reported).  I noticed in several of our projects that regen, regenall, and switching between layout tabs is painfully slow in 2015 compared to 2014.  In 2014 any of those operations would take less than a second, but in 2015 it takes 5-6 seconds.  That's a big step backwards. 

I tried auditing, purging, and wblocking, but nothing changed.  I also played with the graphicsconfig/3dconfig settings, though there's way fewer options in 2015 than there were in 2014, but there's not much that affects 2D drafting anyway.  Still no luck.  A fresh install vs install and migrate old settings made no difference either. 

What does work is freezing the layer that has brick hatches on it.  These aren't custom, just the built-in hatches, but as you can imagine on even a relatively small house they can cover a lot of the elevations.  There's also some sand/stippling hatches and crosshatching for walls but those layers don't seem to be impacting performance.  Having transparency on or off doesn't seem to have any effect either, and I don't know if there's anything else to try.  Since it works fine in 2014 it could be a bug, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some new setting somewhere that might have an effect.  Any ideas?

Dell Precision T1600 Workstation

Intel Xeon E31245 Quad-Core 3.3 GHz

12 GB RAM

NVIDIA Quadro 600

Windows 7 Pro SP1 64-bit

[pendean]

NVIDIA card users sem to benefit from finding and installing updated drivers.

[Anonymous]

I doubt I have the absolute most current NVIDIA driver (they seem to release a new one every month or so) but it's pretty recent. Disabling hardware acceleration made no difference though. I'll give it a try when I get in to work tomorrow but I doubt it will make much difference.

[pendean]

2015 is all about hardware accelration: I would not disable it unless you absolutely had to do so.

[Anonymous]

I installed the most current NVIDIA driver 334.95 and no change. 

I neglected to mention before that although regen takes forever, zooming, panning, and working with the drawing, even with the hatches in question, is just as fluid and responsive as ever.  Also, only freezing that hatch layer fixes the problem, or setting FILL=off, but just turning the layer off does not speed things up.  This leads me to believe that it's not a video card or graphics kind of issue per se.  When doing the slow regen, it does cause a processor spike, and sometimes the acad.exe process briefly shows as not responding/hung, so there's some calculation going on that's really bogging down. 

[pendean]

There is a stack of new variables to handle complex object types: while I can't test your file you might want to dig into those new variables and see if turning them off helps.

AutoCAD's HELP, home page, has a 'new commands' topic: I think the ones you need are as follows but please look up that document for others too COMPLEXLTPREVIEW, PREVIEWEFFECT and maybe even LINESMOOTHING.

[E-Lavoie]

I had similar problems, i turned off the New Tab option, no more waiting, it go as fast as it was in Architecture 2014.

Use NEWTABMODE (System Variable) and put it to 0.

[Anonymous]

None of the system variables or disabling "new tab" helped.  I did find the culprit in a custom stone hatch that I had in a few small parts of the drawing which I forgot were even there.  Removing this specific hatch from the drawing fixes the slowdown, but it's just a workaround since it's fine in 2014.  I attached a file with the hatch and the custom .pat file, though whether the .pat is installed or not doesn't seem to make a difference.  Try to _copy some of the hatched objects, it's completely sluggish for me, to the point of being unusable.  Regen is also very slow. 

In a similar vein, the file also has a PDF attached in the one paper space layout.  Simply panning with the spacebar is also totally jerky and slow, which isn't a problem in 2014 either.  So 2015 is definitely choking on something that 2014 is not.

[Anonymous]

Can anyone reproduce the problems with the files I uploaded?

[ntellery]

I haven't the time to test your drawings right now but I also have found ACA2015 to be agonisingly slow and I am only working on a single story house.  I shudder to think how people go using it on a decent size commericial project.

I've gone back to 13 to try to get the job done but it feels like a shared file has been over written because it's now just as slow.

[blessard_TMG]

I was having this problem as well, I set NEWTABMODE=0 from 2 and switching tabs and regen i much faster.

[hall_embl]

I have been struggling with ACA 2015 since we upgraded last month. I have a project I am working on that I can barely get anything done on. Every time I select elements, change view or in general enter commands it takes anywhere from a few seconds to a minute to respond. Seems to keep hanging.

I have held off posting as I wanted to try all the possible solutions people have mentioned. I have updated NVIDIA drivers, purged drawings, set all the commands to the recommended values (newtabsmode = 0 etc.). None of these have improved the situation.

I don't know what I am missing...

Please help!!

[David_W_Koch]

Do you have the latest Service Pack installed (SP2)?

One thing that can kill performance is to have unresolvable shortcuts in the AutoCAD search path.  One frequent offender is to have a plotter or plot style wizard from a previous release (or a different vertical) copied over when copying the plotters or plot styles to a new release.  If you have uninstalled the previous release, those wizard shortcuts point to files that no longer exist, and AutoCAD will wait for them to time out every time an operation requires looking on the search path.

You may also want to experiment with the settings for the SHOWLAYERUSAGE System Variable.  When set to 1, AutoCAD tracks whether layers are in use, and displays an icon accordingly in the Layer Properties Manager.  This can have a performance hit, particularly in a file with a lot of layers.  If it is set to 1, try changing it to 0 and see if that helps.

[hall_embl]

Hi David,

First thing IT did was install the latest service pack, so it is installed.

We still have previous ACA 11 installed on the computer, together with AC14. IS it only perfoming this search if they have been unistalled?

When I go to set the SHOWLAYERUSAGE, it is already set to 0...but it did strike me as interesting. The template file we have has a huge number of layers, most of which are not in use. If these are being xref'd to other files could this be slowing things down? The reason I ask this is another project I started used a different template that had no existing layers. It functioned much faster! How can I purge the unused layers?

Cheers,

Tom

[hall_embl]

We think it might be the current driver. We updated the NVIDIA driver after installation and the most recent driver was not the same as the Certified driver on Autdesk website. So IT is coming by to try installing the certified driver, which was between the old driver and the most recent.

Fingers crossed.

[hall_embl]

Nope. Neither the latest ACA update or the recommended driver has changed the performance when going to 3D view.

What next?

[Anonymous]

If you're using a predefined pagesetup applied to your tabs, disabling 'Display plot styles' in the setup reduced my regen time by +-66%.