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rumpelstielz
889 Views, 8 Replies

SImulation performance: Fast mode unusably wrong and standard unusably slow

well, graphics performance in general is a huge issue for me in Fusion when working even with pretty simple parts. In this example i want to preview some operations on a single part, it's come to the point where working in fusion becomes a bit tedious, so many repetitions (like having to switch on stock view and toolpath preview setting EVERY time) but in general the graphics framerate when simulating is unacceptably slow. As you can see in Fast mode it's completely unusable, sometimes it's working for a single operation but when previewing multiple operations most of the times it's just garbage display like here. When the operations are fully simulated in STandard mode the framerate is so slow that it takes about 15seconds to rotate the view.

 

I don't think my system is at fault here since i'm getting stellar graphics/3d performance in many other applications (Rhino, Grasshopper, Houdini, Zbrush, Touchdesigner) and can play all latest games in 2560 in max quality without dropping under 30FPS. The card is a reasonably recent Palit NVIDIA GTX 960 with 4GB of VRAM, the processor is an i7-2600k, i have 16 GB of RAM a super fast startup SSD and pretty fast data drives. In other 3D applications it's extremely rare that my redraw becomes sluggish and i really have to throw shedloads of geometry at the card for this to happen.

 

So i'm really surprised of the abysmal performance of the simulation in Fusion. Is this just me, something in my settings or my system ? Is everyone else getting no problems with this ?

 

PS: i have a double boot Mac10.10/WIndows7 on this machine and both have this problem, i have tried all the (few) different graphics driver options in the prefs but this does not solve it.

 

sorry for the long screencast at some point i let it simulate in standard mode which takes a while, but you can see from this how time consuming and problematic working like this is. I'm just trying to preview my operations in the process of optimising my operations. I'm even starting making coffee in between sessions when the simulation runs .. it's the 90's all over again, i thought we were past this with modern GPUs, loads of RAM, mutlithreading and whatnot ...

 

 

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GENERAL DISCLAIMER: if there isn't a file attached to my posts then there is a reason for it. wherever i can i will attach a file for troubleshooting.If no file is attached i will always try to explain as clearly as possible with illustrative screenshots. when i have an issue that can only be helped by attaching a file which i cannot share publicly i won't ask about it here.
EB553
in reply to: rumpelstielz

Just a quick one to report the same thing. My system specs:

 

Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
Intel Core i7 4790K @ 4.00GHz
16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 665MHz (9-9-9-24)
Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. Z97X-UD5H-BK (SOCKET 0) 
2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 (MSI)
465GB Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB (SSD)

rumpelstielz
in reply to: rumpelstielz

hi again, i'm still really struggling with this, could maybe someone from the Fusion team comment.

 

Reading back over my initial post i'm afraid that it probably sounds a bit hostile, this was not my intent, i really love Fusion and fully understand that it's a complicated new product which will take time to mature. However this issue is becoming a major slowdown in my workflow now that i am starting to switch all my machining to Fusion and am tackling more complex projects. As much as i love the CAM features in Fusion these graphics issues add many unneccessary hours to my weekly work and makes it incredibly tedious to work and i really need to find a solution to this or at least know that it will be resolved at some point.

 

So maybe let me rephrase my question: what can i do on my side to alleviate this?

would another graphics card help, is Fusion not meant to be used with mid-leve graphics cards like mine, is it more geared towards pro cards in the 1000$+ range ?

Is there maybe an issue with this particular graphics card and another make/model wouldn't have these issues ?

Or would an AMD card offer better performance ?

I'm assuming that the CPU is not much involved with the simulation framerate but if it is would upgrading my i7-2600k (which is a couple years old) to a more recent i7 or a Xeon help to improve performance significantly ?

Is there anything else i could do ?

 

Someone suggested that the bad performance i'm getting is due to the fact that i use very small vertical stepdowns in my operations,unfortunately that's not something i can change at the moment, this is all my machine can handle for now and i have neither the budget nor the time to acquire a new CNC.

 

==================================================
GENERAL DISCLAIMER: if there isn't a file attached to my posts then there is a reason for it. wherever i can i will attach a file for troubleshooting.If no file is attached i will always try to explain as clearly as possible with illustrative screenshots. when i have an issue that can only be helped by attaching a file which i cannot share publicly i won't ask about it here.
kb9ydn
in reply to: rumpelstielz

That does seem quite bad, and the part doesn't look especially complicated.  Is there any chance you could upload that part here so I could try simulating it?  That would at least indicate whether or not it's a problem specific to your computer.  If you can't I might be able to come up with model of similar complexity.

 

 

C|

rumpelstielz
in reply to: kb9ydn

many thanks @kb9ydn yes you can download the file from this thread: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/computer-aided-machining-cam/how-to-avoid-stock-collisions-can-t-seem-... if you don't mind so i don't have to upload it again, it is linked to the initial post and inclides all the CAM operations you see in the screencast above.

 

will be interesting to see if you also get the garbled display in fast mode.

 

For the the framerate in standard mode it's especially laggy when you select several operations to be previewed, it's less critical when only previewing single operations. But previewing several operations in context has becom essential for my workflow over the years so the workaround of only previewing single operations is really only a crutch.

==================================================
GENERAL DISCLAIMER: if there isn't a file attached to my posts then there is a reason for it. wherever i can i will attach a file for troubleshooting.If no file is attached i will always try to explain as clearly as possible with illustrative screenshots. when i have an issue that can only be helped by attaching a file which i cannot share publicly i won't ask about it here.

@rumpelstielz one thing to note about the fast mode is it's 3 axis only and the job you're running the sim on is 4 axis or 3 + 1 as all you've done is index 180° for the second setup. Graphics card and CPU do seem to make a difference to standard, I don't do any 2 sided stuff so I don't know if that's what's slow. Looking at Task Manager while a sim runs shows it's not using more than 1 process so more cores will not help, just go for the fastest processor.

 

Mark

Mark Hughes
Owner, Hughes Tooling
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@rumpelstielz I downloaded the file from the other thread and I have one idea. If you enable smoothing you get far fewer lines of code and it will speed up the sim a bit. I've attached a file, take a look at the tolerance and smoothing tolerance. For finishing ops I set it to 0.0005 and 0.00075 and the contouring op dropped from 2.9mb to 244kb, not sure why you get all the collision warnings in that op, don't have time to look at the moment. Anyway try this file and see if it's any better. I have added smoothing to the adaptive cuts as well.

 

 

Mark

Mark Hughes
Owner, Hughes Tooling
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kb9ydn
in reply to: HughesTooling

In that other file there is also no stock selected for the setups.  I found the stock body for the A-side but I don't know what it should be for the B-side?  There are also a million collisions which could also be slowing things down.

 

I did try simulating the A and B sides anyway and it does go.  Standard mode is definitely slower but not like what you show in the video.  I'm using a dual-core Pentium (that's right, super basic CPU with only 2 cores, but the base clock speed is quite high so performance for single threaded apps is pretty good) with an older AMD Firepro graphics card (only 1GB RAM), so it seems maybe there is something about your machine that's not so good.

 

I'll try the same thing on my laptop at work later for comparison.  It's an original I7 with some generic AMD graphics.  It's definitely slower overall than my home desktop.

 

C|

LibertyMachine
in reply to: kb9ydn

@HughesTooling and @kb9ydn all of his collision issues as well as his stock choice were addressed in the other thread. When I opened it up and sorted it out for him, I did not notice any adverse performance on my PC, so I didn't think to come back to this thread and mention it. Now that it's rolling again, I thought I would share


Seth Madore
Owner, Liberty Machine, Inc.
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