How fast is your Inventor PC really?

[Raider_71]

Hi guys,

We have had to do some testing on a bunch of Inventor PC's recently to determine which of the PC's needs to be replaced. Obviously we needed to find out which of the PC's are the worst eprformers as there was only budget to replace 50% of the design PC's. So we thought the Darwin theory will come in handy right... 🙂

Anyways I started searching on the net for toppics on how to benchmark an Inventor PC. Then I thought whats the point of using gaming benchmark tools because Inventor is not a game and there are more aspects than just graphics performance when it comes to percieved performance on an Inventor PC right.

So we decided to create our own Inventor benchmark tool which tests various aspects of an Inventor PC to give us an overview of our PC's performance. This then helped us make a decision as to whcih pc's to replace.

We have made the tool available free of charge to anyone interested in checking how their PC stacks up to their peers or friends. 🙂

Please download it here and post your results here as well if you want. Would be interesting to see what beast workstations are out there.

I would like to say thanks to Kirk #karthur1, for helping in testing the app.

Please feel free to send any suggestions our way. There is an email link in the app.

Download and Install

The application will work with Inventor 2014 to 2016 only.

IMPORTANT: After installation there will be an Inventor Bench icon on your desktop that looks like this: 

My resluts:

HP Elitebook 8560w with an SSD upgrade.

[blair]

Here is the results with the resolution cranked down to 1920 x 1080 (or close to it for this monitor).

[Neil_Cross]

That's more like it! The other 6700K users must have have been getting the extra point from an overclock.

If you're feeling brave, and your Asus AI Suite is like mine, there's a section in that called 5 way optimisation where you can go for a mobo controlled overclock... I used 4800MHz for my bench tests but don't run it daily.

Edit - minor point, you have 7700K in your signature instead of 6700K.

[mmaes]

looking good but I know your system has more in it. I have virtually the same thing but a different GPU. We built two identical machines so far and I was successfully able to overclock to 5.0ghz but backed it off to 4.9 to be a little safer on one machine and the other only could get to 4.8ghz before blue screen.

I noticed @Neil_Cross mentioned the registry hack, I personally wouldn't recommend using it as I noticed some negative effects when we did try it with real world work environements.  For example when you are creating new drawing views you will not get a "preview" of the orientation of your model, instead you will just see a gray block.  Another thing we noticed were erroneous colors being displayed that would save back to our vault files and the next user (even without the hack) would view the same colors.

[blair]

I'm sure I can crank out more with overclocking. I might get brave sometime and see what happens. I did run the ASUS tweek and it did give about 17% overclock for the standard base setting.

I did go with liquid cooling on this for both the CPU and GPU, it really quiet which I like.

[Neil_Cross]

@mmaes Thanks for the heads up on the issues with the registry hack, I can't remember exactly what I said in the original note but I'm sure I would have given some disclaimer and that Autodesk don't support the use of it so I think I'm off the hook!... to be honest I'd also experienced the grey block issue with drawings but I didn't pin it down to being caused by the hack so I'm glad you mentioned that.  Shame, it makes the FPS go crazy fast too.

[mmaes]

@Neil_Cross hahaha I noticed the gray block straight away and knew it had to be the hack.  As soon as I returned the registry the way it was it was gone.  Definitely no permanent damage done to anything so for some people it may be ok or tolerable but for me I didn't care for it.  I believe I took some screen shots on my other machine I can post up of the inaccurate colors (text in red lettering, outline of drawings in red, etc etc).

You are correct though, in the model environment the frame rate does feel higher the only negative thing I noticed were the model edges were the wrong colors at times (sporadic), the marking menu and view cube were outlined in the wrong color, and the sketch lines and constrained lines were the wrong color.  

Overall Inventor functions just fine with the hack, the user would just have to trade off their normal environment for a slightly different or unusual environment. 

[Anonymous]

Neil here is a test between two mobile GPU: Quadro K5100M and a GTX 980M, and shows beautiful and although the quadro are better for the CAD

This is part of tested scenes in SPECviewperf® 12 on GPU nVidia® Quadro® K5100M in Polish laptop XNOTE P77Q http://www.xnote.pl and GPU nVidia® GeForce® GTX 980M on XNOTE P170http://www.xnote.pl.
To część z testowanych scen w SPECviewperf® 12 na kartach nVidia Quadro K5100M w Polskim laptopie XNOTE P77Q i na karcie GeForce GTX 980M w laptopie XNOTE P170 http://www.xnote.pl.
Quadro K5100M is winner in CATIA®, CREO®, MAYA® I SIEMENS NX®.
Viewset_____Composite 980M__Composite K5100M
catia-04_________38.74_______________64.­60
creo-01__________27.66_______________49.­01
energy-01_________5.18_______________2.1­8
maya-04__________34.07_______________49.­38
medical-01________23.75_______________18­.38
snx-02_____________4.70________________8­5.30
sw-03_____________41.60_______________34­.80

Neil when do you think, because I am reluctant to take a chance or GTX 780 to $ 300 or a Quadro K4000 has $ 400 to my heavy work on Inventor at home. I eagerly await your response.

[Neil_Cross]

That test is meaningless when considering Inventor.  I've never heard of that SpecViewPerf thing, but as it isn't Inventor, it's like comparing a 980M to a K5100M for playing Grand Theft Auto... totally different things.  That other program might be much better optimised to use the Quadro drivers, which is probably the reason why it's so much different.  The 980M is slightly more powerful and based on newer architecture than the K5100M so the fact that this program performs better on the K5100M suggests it's probably purely down to the Quadro drivers.

Also they're laptops, so both laptops will be dramatically different, they'll have different CPUs, different RAM types, different motherboards, the chancea re the laptop with the K5100M in will be of higher spec all round to the one with the 980M in (just a guess).  But either way it's not a fair and equal test.

Just out of interest why are you looking to get a 780 or K4000? They're previous generation cards and will probably be discontinued soon, the newer gen equivalent cards are always going better.

[Anonymous]

tight budget

[blair]

Unless they are going to test Inventor on two identical machines with only the graphics cards being different the results are meaningless with respect to Inventor. The software listed makes use of OpenGL.

[Neil_Cross]

I'd be looking at a 970 over a 780, similar price but newer and built on Maxwell so it's more efficient.  Bear in mind that Pascal is rumored to be coming out in June/July so all prices will drop after then, and the Pascal cards i.e. the GeForce 1070 will be roughly the same price as the 970 is now.

The 780 is still a strong card, very strong, but it's ageing now and many of the specs on the 970 are higher than the 780.  Also don't forget, the GPU really doesn't make a great deal of difference in Inventor, there's dozens of pages of proof in this thread.  The CPU is the money maker.

[Anonymous]

merci neil

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I have just got Inventor 2017 installed on my laptop and thought I would do a bench mark. Would anyone be able to tell me why only my onboard graphics are showing up and not my dedicated card? I have set the graphics priority for Inventor to high and thought that it would have shown up.

Also just a little test which I did with having software graphics ticked within inventor and it made a massive difference. The Low score is with ''software Graphics'' ticked and the others are without. I guess the scores are low because of the Clock speed on the CPU on the laptop and the fact it isn't a ''graphics / CAD'' Laptop. Is anyone able to shed any light upon the scores?

Cheers.

[Neil_Cross]

Congrats you've posted the lowest score so far! Haha

It can be normal on some laptops for the onboard graphics to be reported, I'm on an Alienware 17 R3 right now with a GeForce 980M installed but the bench tool reports the on-board CPU graphics because (annoyingly) they designed them to work together on this unit, they switch based on profiles.

You should have an Intel graphics application which allows you to specify which GPU is used for which application, might be worth making sure Inventor is set to use the discreet GPU rather than the integrated.

Also your CPU is average, 2 cores with hyperthreading, that'll not do much good for the graphics engine.  Still though I would have expected better than what you're getting so take a look and see if you have that Intel application, if not, look on the manufacturers website for the software.  I just downloaded a new version for mine today from the Dell website.

Which laptop is it? Which GPU too?

[Anonymous]

First and last are the only positions which people remember and I wouldnt get 1st....

The Laptop is an Inspiron 15, 7548 with an AMD Radeon R7 M270 4GB DDR3 Graphics card. It was on offer (about a year ago) and had 4k which I thought would be awesome, until I opened Inventor 2016 and realised I couldnt see what i was doing........

[blair]

To add to this, in your system BIOS under the Hard Drive section, most laptop manufacturers have a "Quiet Mode". This reduces the hard drive read heads speed to quiet down the system and improve battery life. Changing this to Normal Operation will improve hard drive performance.

[Neil_Cross]

Also make sure the laptop isn't running in Power Saver mode, that severely gimps almost everything.  Go into power options and select high performance and see how the test goes.

Your warm start time of 22+ seconds indicates something isn't right.  The SSD users are opening Inventor in ~3 seconds but it shouldn't take that long on a mechanical drive.  Because you've only got 2 cores to play with, make sure you don't have a load of other junk running in the background as that could pull the 2 cores away from Inventor.

[Anonymous]

Right,

I have played with a few of the Graphics settings and cleaned up what is running in the backgrounnd too. I started Inventor 2017 again and it was talking a while so I opened Task manager and the HDD activity was maxed right out at 100% while the Processor was barely being used. Im wondering if it is my HDD which is slowing me down. Is there any tests or settings I can change to speed it up? I looked in the Bios but I have no settings in there to change my Hdd (not sure if Dell have hidden them).

[mmaes]

@Anonymous Are you reffering to RAM inside your task manager?

[Anonymous]

No, It is the HDD (as seen in the attached pic). That isnt a snippet of when Inventor is running .