3D CAD and GPU

[Anonymous]

I currently run Fusion360 on a PC with i7-4790 CPU and 32GB of memmory
and having two GPU:s a Geforce950Ti and a QuadroP2000 card. I design
and export .stl files for my 3D-printer but it takes forever when I
try to makes large patterns of small features on my designs. I not
sure the Fusion360 take advantage of my QuadroP2000 card, are there
better softwares to do the same basis extrusion of rectangular blocks a few centimeters with a primitive design partnern in micro meter scale applied to the whole surface e.g. using Inventor or autocad that benefits from the power of the GPU?

Thank you.

[mike.tessier]

Hi @Anonymous,

Thanks for posting and welcome to the Fusion community!

Fusion should be more than capable of handling this! I think that you might just have to specify that Fusion uses your Quadro P2000. To do this, you can right click the shortcut on your desktop, hover over "Run with graphics processor" and select your Quadro P2000 from the contextual menu.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Cheers,

[Anonymous]

Thanks,

I guess this applies to win10 or am I wrong?
There is no such menu in win7.

Regards,

Jennifer

[HughesTooling]

@PhilProcarioJr has made several post on the Quadro cards being slow compared to a good gaming cards.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-design-validate/video-card-question/m-p/6843679/highlight/...

If you search the forum you'll find more posts.

[Anonymous]

Why do they specify the Quadro cards as exceptional/certified hardware for Autodesk solutions?

Would Inventor benefit from the P2000 compared to a gaming card?

Regards,

Jennifer

[HughesTooling]

Inventor would probably benefit. Most professional CAD programs use openGL, Fusion use Directx. Quadro cards are not optimized for Directx so don't perform as well as a good gaming card.

Mark

[michaelpos]

@HughesTooling

Does Fusion 360 use DirectX both on Windows and Mac OS?  For some reason I seem to recall reading that Fusion uses OpenGL on Windows and DirectX on Mac, but I may well be wrong or it could be old information.

I'm interested in this topic because I'm considering building a dedicated CAD workstation with both Fusion and Solidworks installed and am not quite sure what GPU route to go. 

[HughesTooling]

@michaelpos You've got it the wrong way around, DirectX is for windows.

Mark

[michaelpos]

@HughesTooling

Thanks!  So for clarity, Fusion is using OpenGL for MacOS?  If that's the case, then a "pro" (rather than gamer's) GPU would actually work better on MacOS, correct?

[HughesTooling]

Don't use mac so don't know. @TrippyLighting do you have any advice? 

Not sure but does Solidworks only work with certified cards, think you might have to use a Quadro card. Did you read the thread I linked in post#4?

Mark

[michaelpos]

Thanks, yes I did read that thread but my impression is that it's a Windows platform the person is using, so I'm not sure how much it transfers over to Mac.

All of the discussion (not just in that thread) I've seen surrounding gaming vs pro GPU's for Fusion has always centered around Fusion's use of DirectX as opposed to the OpenGL used by other CAD platforms, but now I'm learning that Fusion uses OpenGL on MacOS so I'm not sure of how applicable those discussions actually are for me.

[Anonymous]

Hi, for clarification I am trying to create rather basic patterns of rectangles, extruded to 5 different heights (see the attached print screen, showing one unit selected) on a flat surface and then replicated using the rectangular patterning tool by selecting the different features. I have tried different compute options where the optimized or the identical gives the shortest results.

The problem is that I only manage to cover a small area fraction of the entire surface. My preferred number of unit cells is 340x180. I tried to leave the computer for a long time (I do not recall the maximum number of units I tried but around 100x100) but even if the process succeeds it takes forever to e.g. handling or orienting the model afterwards so not very practical.

Computer specification: Lenovo 10A70037MX Workstation using win7 64 bit, 4 cores CPU i7-4790 3.6 GHz, 32 GB 1600 MHz internal memory, SSD drive, NVIDEA Quadro P2000 graphics.

To me, the task seems too heavy and I am not sure if its due to my strategy, software settings or computer specifications. I tried Inventor but with similar results.

• Do you have alternative tools/strategies to create similar designs? Maybe to iterate a process by using copy the unit cell and then unite those using combine. A little bit tedious and not very practical when one would like to change something in the design.

• Can you instruct me how to optimize the software settings for this specific task. For example, turn specific graphical features of or maybe operate without capturing design history to allocate more focus to the task at hand?
• Would upgrading the computer components help? (I´m not sure if the specific software/task would benefit from e.g. increasing the number of CPU cores)

Your expertise is greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,

Jennifer

[HughesTooling]

Are the blocks joined to the main block? I think copying Faces will be the fastest to compute, start the pattern command with type set to faces and click the features on the timeline this will select the faces those features created then pattern.

Can you share the design as an f3d file? What are you doing with the finished part, could you split it up into tiles to make the larger part? May be make a component that 2x2 or 4x4 then pattern the component.

Mark

[TrippyLighting]

The title of you thread has mislead most of the other posters to go down the GPU road.

However, what you are encountering as absolutely nothing to do with the GPU and what API is used on Windows or macOS.

You problem is the creation of geometry and that is handled bu 2 areas of Fusion 360. One area is the sketch solver. So if you are patterning a large number of instances, don't create patterns in the sketch, but rather pattern 3D geometry in the form of features, bodies or faces. 

The second area of concern ins the geometric modeling kernel which is responsible - amongst other thighs also involving sketches - for creating the 3D geometry. Most geometric kernels are relatively old an in general the math and algorithms are not easy to parallelize and as such it would make no sense to move that burden to the GPU.

In general, if you need large patterns consisting of many object distributed over a surface and particularly if you need this for 3D printing, then Fusion 360 is not the best software for this.

The purpose of geometric modeling kernels as employed in CAD software is to create mathematically precise geometry. As such a pattern of 380 x 180 = 61,200 objects. or one object with a large number of geometric features (if you used a feature pattern). For a CAD system that can a very complex object.

For Sub-D modeler like Blender, for example, this is peanuts. Your machine using a Sub-D mesh can easily handle 4-8 million polygons and likely more.

However, if you do want to stay with Fusion 360 most definitely, turn off the timeline.

[michaelpos]

@TrippyLighting Great info!  I had always assumed that creating patterns within sketches was computationally efficient than patterning solid body features.

[Anonymous]

Thanks you all for great information,

My workflow so far has been;

Sketch the main block, extrude the block, create a new sketch of the rectangles on the main block top face, iterate the process of selecting different rectangles within the unit cell pattern to be extruded to the same height, selecting the 5 extruded features in the timeline and pattern them (I will try changing the type to faces instead of features).

I also tried enlarge the unit cell to 2x2 the current size as well as trying convert one unit cell body to a component and pattern that to the final size but both strategies were still very demanding.

So far I have been using a strategy with several (hundreds) small tiles 10x10 unit cells that I later arrange to form the larger part. That worked for smaller parts but as I now need larger ones it´s not an option. However, a small number of tiles (4x4) is manageable.

I tried to attached the f3d file directly but couldn´t, here is a dropbox link instead.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r2855las6aag1n6/S%20alt.f3d?dl=0

I will try the blender software as well.