Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

And comparing the old machine the the shiny new one.  On average there is a 35.2% improvement at the same parts count.  In reality, 35% better than a small number is still a small number.

[#2]

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smjanows wrote:

....Quality is a bit faster than performance.  Huh?  The smoother versus rougher settings make no difference.

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When I was doing the tests, I found the fastest setting was "Compatibility, then Quality... Performance was actually the slowest. (look back on page 6 of this thread)

Odd that you dont see any difference in smoother vs rough.

[#3]

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm surprised you were able to get almost 100% CPU usage from Inventor.  Inventor isn't able to take advantage of multiple cores, so on a dual core machine, the most CPU usage you would see is 50%, a quad core would be 25%.  Did you have other applications running in the background, and were using the overall CPU usage instead of the CPU usage of the Inventor Process?

[#4]

DX11 is a multithreaded API.  It's a driver related issue I think.  I've posted in the past about nvidia vs ATI cards on my old E8400 machine.  I think there's a driver related issue.  It seems nVidia cards scale better than ATI/AMD with CPU using Inventor.  But, I need to get a couple power adapters and throw the GTX480 into the HP to run some tests.

[#5]

dx11 is multithreaded but Inventor is only DX10.1 (i thought), plus would guess the application would need to be programmed to take advantage of the cores (both cpu and gpu) instead of just letting Dx11 run wild (purely a guess tho).

not to mention Autodesk have stated that Inventor presently doesn't use more than 1 processor apart from FEA, rendering and from Iv2012 each view in an idw can use a separate process so a quad core can draw 4 views simultaneously. 

[#6]

A few more data points:  The GTX480 on the i7 and the 7950 and 5870 on the Core2Duo.  On the i7, 2 of 4 cores were fully utilized with the nVidia card.  That is to say that CPU usage per the Inventor process was 50%.  As you can see, the GTX480 is the best performer on both machines.

Both machines are running at 1680 x 1050 on the primary monitor.  The new machine also has a second 1680 x 1050 display.

[#7]

Adding 1 more graphics card to the mix:  An old GeForce 8800 GTS.  You will be surprised with the results.

The 8800 GTS is holds its own against new cards once again proving the Inventor is severly CPU limited.  At the 15 fps mark of 600 parts on the i7, Inventor will max out 2 cores while manipulating the model.  The GTX 480 utilization was near 11%, and the 8800 GTS about 38%.  This shows that even an old graphics card has more than enough horsepower.  Save your money and invest in a big fast SSD and a liquid cooling system to overclock your CPU through the roof.  The GTX 480 datapoint on the old machine at 800 parts is the only anomoly and must have been entered incorrectly.

That's all the hardware I have to benchmark.

[#8]

Ok, I am not 100% sure I am doing this correctly but want to know as I just built a new computer.

Here is what I have

Intel i7 2600k (overclocked to 4.5ghz) 

Nvidia GTX 580 (overclocked) GPU

ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 MOBO

16gb G. Skill Ripjaws pc3 12800 RAM

RAIDMAX RX-1000AE 1000W PSU

With the speed all the way up on my Space Explorer I was between 15.38 and 15.63 hz with 700 parts. 800 parts about 13 hz, 900 parts 12 hz, and 1000 10.50 hz.  This is all with shaded with edges, 1920x1080, and set to performance with millenium (1 color) for the background.

Does this sound right?  I have yet to get to do any real tests besides this because I just built the machine and it's not set up on our server yet. 

[#9]

Yes, that sounds about right.  Since around 15 hz is where the rotation gets choppy, we we trying to see what the part count was when we were seeing 15hz.  The values that you have reported are very similar to what smjanows shows on his charts right above your post.

How in the crap are you getting 4.5 ghz out of the i7?  I never could get mine stable at that speed. What do you have for a hard drive in this system?

[#10]

To answer the question about overclock, I actually had it up to 4.8 but bumped it down a bit for safety.  I run 7 fans inside my enclosure as well as a large heatsink.  This was achieved with Asus's auto overclock feature in their bios.  So simple to use.  As for hard drive I run a Cosair CSSD-F120GB3-BK Force Series 3 Solid State Drive - 120GB, 2.5", SATA III, 6Gbps and a HITACHI Deskstar 7K1000.D HDS721075DLE630 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s.

WEI Rating

Processor 7.8

memory (RAM) 7.9

Graphics 7.9

Gaming Graphics 7.8

Primary hard disk 7.9

 

On a side note I just ran the same test on my HP HDX 18 Notebook with Intel Core 2 Duo T9900 @ 3.06ghz and Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT and was only able to achieve 15hz with 250 parts.

WEI Rating

Processor 6.6

memory (RAM) 6.6

Graphics 5.3

Gaming Graphics 6.4

Primary hard disk 5.9