Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

Hello,

I am using Inventor 2013 to create some complex shaped Maritime items.  They have a lot of lofts, variable radius curves, fillets, etc.  Anyway, on the more complex pieces, my menus start to dissapear or a dialog box, for example the fillet dialog box, will turn solid black and my system will hangup for a minute while executing the command.  Am I running low on system memory or is this a video card issue?  Here are my system specs:

HP XW8400 with two 3.4 GHz Xeon CPU's

4 GB RAM

160 GB Western Digital Raptor Hard Drive with approx 90 GB free

Quadro FX 1800 Video Card

Windows 7 Professional

Autodesk Inventor Premium Design Suite

Thanks in advance for any information,

[#2]

I'd try upgrading the video driver if you haven't already.

[#3]

Probably time to update your system, at least 8Gb of memory minimum and go to a 64 bit O/S. A fast gaming card with a couple of Gb of memory on the card.

With a 32bit O/S you are pretty much at the limite with 3 1/2 - 4Gb even with using the 3Gb switch in your start-up INI file.

[#4]

I forgot to mention, I am running a 64 bit Windows 7 Professional operating system as well as 64 bit versions of all software including the Inventor Premium Design Suite.  I believe my video card has 2 GB memory on it.  Seeing how a new workstation is not financially feasable I'm thinking of upgrading to 8 GB of system memory.  First, I'll check my video card driver and upgrade it if needed.

Thank you,

[#5]

We were having a similar issue on several of our stations.  We were getting a message like "The video driver has stopped responding and recovered..." or something like that.  Are you getting any sort of message?

[#6]

4Gb on memory with a 64 bit O/S would simular to having 3Gb with a 32 bit O/S. Upgrading to at least 8Gb would be a big help.

This would be a good place to compare graphic card performance: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ 

Inventor will be slightly different, but it should get you pretty close to real world performance with IV. A good gaming card is all that is now required for IV since the move by Autodesk back with IV11 to use D3D and move away from OpenGL.

[#7]

karthur1,

I don't get any type of error message at any time.

[#8]

how did the video driver update go that I suggested earlier, or did I miss that info...

[#9]

ampster,

I haven't got to the video driver upgrade yet.  I'll likely do it this evening, then let you know.  I am in the process of getting drawings ready to mail to a client.

Thanks,

[#10]

I upgraded the video driver to Nvidia's most current release.  After some use I will know if there is an improvement.  I would still like to increase the system memory from 4GB to 8GB.  Does anybody have a good source for system memory?  Apparently the ECC fully buffered memory my system requires is still a more expensive type, I can find it for about $250 plus shipping for 8GB.

It's been so long since I had to tinker with my system I am embarrassed to say I had mistaken some of its specs in my first post here.  The two CPU's are dual core 3 GHz Xeon's and the Quadro FX1800 video card apparently only has 758 or 768 MB ram.

Unfortunately I have other FEA software that requires an Open GL video card so at this time a Direct X gaming video card won't work for me.

Thanks,