Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

As a follow on to my  thread about graphcis cards vs cpu upgrade it was mentioned that my FX570 was an old card with only 256 Mb ram so I went out and got a GTX 560 with 1Gb of DDR5 ram. 

Based on the numbers in the comparison chart where the FX 570 scores a dismal 351 I was expecting a noticable difference

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

But it didnt seem much better so I did a test.  I copied my whole assembly into another folder and tested both cards with 2011 & 2012.  The test was to edit a sketch in a top level part and record the rebuild time for the assembly.

Resuts

2011 with 570 FX  2min 34 sec.

2012 with 570 FX  2 min 35 sec.

2011 with GTX 560   2 min 41sec.

2012 with GTX 560   2 min 43 sec.

Yep the old FX 570 was faster.

There was no noticable difference in pan, zoom & rotate.

System specs

E8400 Core Duo 3.0 Ghz

8 Gb ram

Seagate Baracuda HD 500Gb, 7200 rpm

An expensive lesson.

[#2]

I suspect that the rebuild time is almost entirely a CPU operation, so this doesn't really test the graphics, does it?

[#3]

Every time I ask about how to improve general performance the FX570 card and its lack of ram is the first thing blamed, so it tests the validity of blaming cards on lack of performance. 

ie post 3 in this one http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Inventor/More-RAM-or-new-video-card/td-p/3343981

My thoughts were that the cpu was doing its job and  the card was the bottleneck in sending the results to the screen.  Ram is under utilised so extra ram wont help. 

So clearly more ram and $$$ on the card is not relevant in working faster, and new cpu's are just more cores (no good to us) but not much faster, the I7's are slower.  Surely two 3.0Ghz cores are better than 4 slower ones where part/assembly modelling are concerned.

So it seems to me that there isnt any hardware that will allow for significantly faster rebuilds.  I'm sure there are many more people out there that have spent big $$ on a new card and gained nothing.  I'm glad I didnt buy a 590.  As well as the card I had to upgrade my power supply to power it, so $350 and a day of messing around to go slower.

The next step for me is to figure out how to overclock to 3.4Ghz and put the card on ebay.

[#4]

I'm not sure if i can help with your speed problem, but maybe you'll find this topic interesting:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Inventor/Benchmark-for-Autodesk-Inventor-2012/td-p/3213542

That might be a good way to put your 2 graphic cards through their paces...

Also, could RAM bus speed be an issue? maybe faster RAM could help?

Or maybe even a faster HD?

I'm just saying stuff to give you ideas, i can't give a solution because system speed is dependent on so many variables.

Personally i'd probably go for the GTX card, just because of the (presumed) better direct3D compatibility.

[#5]

Thanks, I have seen that thread but my knowledge of computers isnt good enough to understand what they are testing, refresh rate or something. 

I dont know about shading, rendering etc, just thought it was interesting that the card with 4 times the ram slowed rebuild times.  And I still get an error saying I dont have enough ram when I try to apply shadows and reflections.

As for Ram speed I dont know but do know that I have 5GB free so its not even using all the Ram that's available.  Really frustrating to see all that fast ram doing nothing.

Maybe its because XP is limited to DirectX9.  Maybe a newer Quadro card would be better.  Who knows.

Except for increasing my cpu speed I think I have reached  the limits of Inventor, and it's under 400 parts, although they are mathematically quite challenging.

[#6]

If your running windows xp thats a problem in iteself?  Are you running 32 bit or 64 bit?  You will see a noticable jump in speed with a 64 bit operating system, I did anyway.  Also like you said I don't think XP  allows you to access the full potential of your graphics card.  Time to upgrade to a newer operating system I would say.  If you have more than 4 gigs of RAM and are running XP the rest is a waste as XP can't use more than 4, ever.

[#7]

I forgot to put that in the specs, yes on XP64 with 8 gig ram, but usually have 5.5 unused, so was actaully thinking about downgrading to 32 bit so I can get my printer drivers and VBA working.  I cant see any point in 64 bit if ram isnt being used.

As for win7 its the same question, will I see an improvement or not?  It could just be another waste of time & money that introduces new problems with other software.  The fact that they have an XP simulation add on tells me there will be problems otherwise they wouldnt need it.

[#8]

Remember that in XP32,you only get 4GB of address space.  You have to deduct the size of your video RAM, Windows OS requirements, Driver memory requirements, etc from that 4GB space to find out how much RAM will be left over for IV to use. 

The other restriction is that Windows only allows 2 GB for any one application. The other 2 GB is used the system overhead.

If your IV is using 2.5GB currently, you will not be able to work with stock XP32.  If you set the 3GB switch with XP32, Windows will allow a process to use up to 3 GB of RAM.  However, you may introduce some instability until you find the right amount of RAM to allocate to any process and your system overhead requirements. 

[#9]

Newer cards are optimized to run Directx11 on Win7. I would really expect to see a degredation in performance of a new card running in XP on DirectX9 as well. The new cards and drivers are optimized for DirectX11.