Extremely Slow on Mac

[Anonymous]

I'm a Solidworks convert and am really loving the whole integrated unity of Fusion.

Fusion runs really quick and perfect on my PC. However, on my 27" iMac it is outrageously slow, basically unusable. It would be easy to chalk this up to hardware, but on the same machine I can run Solidworks and Solidcam in Parallels and have no issue with speed.

Is this something that is currently under development/improvement? Is there anything I can do to make significant changes to the speed? I have already tried checking the "Limit all effects" checkbox as detailed here
http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/fusion-360/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/How-...

[schneik-adsk]

Few questions...

Is this a 4K iMac?

what model iMac sepcificaly (ie year and graphics card)?

Is the performance unusable on an empty document or with a specific design? Can you describe the design - solids/components or surfaces?

[Anonymous]

27 inch iMac Mid 2011

2.7 GHz Intel Core i5

16GB 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM

AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB

The Mac is a few years old, but it runs Solidworks and Solidcam just fine (And even virtualized!)

The slowness is all the time (just starting a model, editing an existing model). Evene when editinge xisting models, the models are extremely tiny (one sketch that has been extruded, for instance). Even getting the "line" to show up when you right click the mouse and drag in a direction to pick an action has a significant delay.

[schneik-adsk]

Here are a series of things to try in order to see if we can get to the bottom of what might be the cause.

Try each bullet below one at a time and then test out how the graphics orbit, pan zoom and marking menu feel. It will be helpful if you do this in progression. Hopefully one will all of a sudden make a profound improvement and know which change did will help us a lot.

First. Start Fusion and work in a new empty design.

1. At the bottom in the navigation toolbar under Display settings, set the Environment to Photobooth
2. Next set Display style to Shaded with Visible edges
3. Next set Display style to Shaded
4. At the bottom in the navigation toolbar under Grid and Snaps open Grid Settings and disable Reference Numbers
5. Under Gris and Snaps turn off Layout Grid
6. At the bottom the navigation toolbar under Diaply settings, disable Object Shadows
7. Next, disable Floor Reflections
8. Next, disable Ambient Shadows
9. Next, disable Floor Shadows
10. Next, disable Anti Aliasing
11. Finally disable Floor and Dome
12. Under your name in the top right select Preferences and select Graphics from the list in the left side pane. Turn on the option to Limit Effects when memory is low
13. Next, Increase Minimum FPS to 60.
14. Next, Set Transparency Effect to Better Performance ( should already be there but let us make sure)
15. Again go to Preferences and  Select Data Collection from the list in the left side pane. Turn Off all three checkboxes.
16. Run the app windowed i.e. not full screen and not, "maximised." Basically resize the Fusion 360 application window so that there is a 10% margin around it where you can see your desktop.
17. From the File Menu in the top right go to View and turn Off the Viewcube.
18. Next torn Off the Browser, Comments, Toolbar and Navigation bar.
19. Press command + space and type in "activity monitor". Switch to the Memory tab. At the bottom what is the memory pressure graph showing? Look for Fusion 360, accoreconsole, inventorserverhost in the process list if any are above 600mb, which are? Switch to the CPU tab and look for the same processes are any showing not-active or high CPU usage?
20. Finally, under the "?" in the upper right select Diagnostic Log Files. Collect the Zip file and email it along with a note about this post to support.fusion360 at autodesk.com.

[Anonymous]

Here's a video of a sure fire way to make the program lockup every time

http://autode.sk/1LqFE7F

[keqingsong]

Thanks for the video. It's worth knowing that when you get the pin wheel in Fusion 360, it doesn't always mean that it is crashing. In many cases (such as this one), seeing the pin wheel indicates that it is trying to solve in the background, and may take awhile, but it'll eventually compute. 

Like @schneik-adsk said, if you send us your diagnostic log file, we can dig deeper into why performance is slow on your end. 

[LMD001]

Hello Keqing,

Tried this at home and I can confirm this behavior, did the extrude and got the SPOD, went off doing something else, came back after 25 minutes and no change.

Force quit Fusion 360.

CER: 118863831

Hope this is of any help.

Best regards,

Ludo

[innovatenate]

There may be another way to compute this geometry utilizing a feature pattern which has an Optimized setting that may help with the performance. 

Check out my Screencast detailing this approach.

http://autode.sk/1OOwVS7

Attached is a sample archive file.  Below is a public link to the file.

http://a360.co/1LtWh6I

One plus for us is that you don't need to run in a virtualized environment because we are able to take advantage of Open GL AND Direct X graphics! Which reminds me... in the Fusion 360 preferences, are you able to change the Graphics Driver field from Open GL or Open GL Core Profile?

Also, how many things were running in the background when you were recording? You can use the activity monitor to check for processor and memory stress levels. 

I hope this helps.

Thanks,

[Anonymous]

I definitely appreciate the video and effort you went through to show a better way to do this. However, my issue was less about the specific model, and more about the program itself being slow/freezing. To be truthful, the only purpose of the specific part was just to show the speed issues, it was never a real part. 

I can understand that there will always be some type of performance ceiling (You're not gonna computer 10,000,000 sketch entities), but it seemed from my example it should have been something that ADF360 should have been able to handle (it handles it on PC no problem).

[Anonymous]

Same here... Mac mini late 2012, Intel Core i5 2.5ghz, 16gb ram, Intel HD Graphics 1536mb, Fusion drive (SSD+HDD).

Not a 'beast' but graphically more than fast enough for Fusion. Edititng and navigating a drawing goes very well, as well as rendering, etc... It absolutely FLIES in Rhino for Mac, Sketchup, ... and SolidWorks in VMware!

The problems with Fusion come when I want to move multiple objects, edit multiple selections etc... everything that needs some calculation. This brings up the beach ball and leaves me wondering if it will recover or not. Often is does, but one time out of ten it just keeps spinning, and can keep doing so for hours...

I don't know why this happens, especially since Fusion works beter in VMware for me than natively in OS X???

It is very obvious that something is 'wrong' here, and as much as I like Fusion 360, I like my Mac and Mac OS X more so I will keep an eye out for alternatives.

One last example is a drawing from a 3D printer that I have in Sketchup. It works very fast and reliable there, editing, viewing, navigating... In Fusion the design doesn't even load most of the times, and when it does, freezes the screen (or rather, 1 frame per minute) and is unworkable.

I beg Autodesk and their developers to do something about this, as you really have a wonderful application here, please keep on optimizing!

[O.Tan]

Hmm, for the Mac users.

Have you tried changing to Open GL Core Profile? To me this worked wonders in upping Fusion performance to the point where it's better then Windows. Though it's focused more on viewport performance.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the tip. However, this made it worse for me. Slugglish graphics on the mini (which had no display issues at all, just the occasional beachballing, which is not normal for an SSD-equipped i5 Mac with 16gb ram. 

So sad that such a powerful application is let down by poor programming on the Mac OS X side.

Currently learning Onshape, looks and feels a lot like SolidWorks, and does not feel sluggish, even on my late 2008 MacBook with 8gb of ram and SSD.

[Anonymous]

Following, Fusion 360 works fine on my wife's HP but is basically useless on my Mac.  I'm not a fan of the HP so I would really like a fix for this.  Like you I am able to run several other graphics intensive programs on my Mac, but unfortunately Fusion 360 freezes for several minutes at a time when i'm working on a design.

[Robllewellyn]

Is that it? The end of the chat for Mac users?

Its now unusable on my Mac. Fusion had been fine until recent updates. And its a fairly chunky, year old MacBookPro

Seems to be compute related for sure. If I do a sketch of a circle, pattern it in sketch to be 15 rows by 15 rows, then thats the end of my modelling..

[lichtzeichenanlage]

Because you mentioned patterns and sketches you should will find like hundreds of posts recommending:

• Prefer features over sketches -> Keep your sketches small
• Prefer feature based patterns of sketch based patterns.
• Within feature based patterns prefer components over features/faces over bodies

Can you export and upload or share your design for a more detailed example?