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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.
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.
I would say that its not a good idea to isolate the cards, from different systems, and compare their results like that. I would think that if one had to use one computer system and run two sets of tests on it, one with the 970 and one with the 980, that the results with the 980 in the system, would be better.
Providing that the PSU in the system is good enough to drive both cards from a power point of view. The Nvidia driver is unified in nature so that should not be a problem either. Also the cards needs to be from the same manufacturer to make it fair.
Anyways that would be my educated guess and prediction. Wish I had resources to actually test this. 
Let us know what you find and decide on.
Cheers
@Mario-Villada I can't be positive but you may be referring to my computer. I have the 6700k overclocked to 4.9Ghz and the GTX 960 overclocked as well and I believe (if I didn't miss anything) that computer has the highest score so far in this thread (12.8x I think). Possibly that is the reason one computer with a better card isn't scoring quite as high. BUT in all honesty we have two of these computers with the same exact hardware, one scored slightly lower than the other but in everyday use you cannot see one bit of difference between the two.
@tom_vierling wrote:
Side note, PCI-E/m.2 SSD's seem to be a big part of getting that 12+ score. I'll be looking into those for sure
Speaking specifically regarding this benchmark test, the PCIe drives aren't beneficial over a standard SATA3 SSD. Purely in this test, Inventor isn't reading or writing enough data to gain benefit from a high end drive, perhaps when working on an assembly with thousands of physical files you might see marginal benefits but for one file it isn't making any difference to have a high end PCIe NVME drive.
Even the file save time in this test isn't a reflection of drive speed, standard SSD's write roughly 500 mb per second, the test file is 20mb, but the file save times are between 5-6 seconds. Saving files isn't a straight forward file copy.
@Mario-Villada I haven't tested a 970 and a 980, but I've tested a 970, Quadro M4000, K4000, R9 380, Quadro 2000 and FirePro W9100 in one single workstation, and what I observed is that Inventor graphics performance does not scale with GPU power. A crap card like the Quadro 2000 which has next to no cuda cores and low VRAM will bottleneck performance to some degree, but then once you get to the level of a 970, R9 380 etc you see practically no difference between the cards. The 970 is a £250 card, the W9100 is a £3500 card, but frame rates in Inventor are almost identical. I'm interested to see what difference if any the 1070 and 1080 bring with the new architecture but I wouldn't be surprised to see no difference in frame rates in Inventor going from a 970 even up to a 1080.
Just to add to that, what is definitely important but I never see anybody ever talking about with 3D CAD is to consider GPU memory (VRAM) quantity when choosing a card.
If you're one of those people who has 2 or 3 monitors, a few applications open and multiple drawings and models open, you can very very easily snarf up a load of VRAM which is when you start seeing performance drops.
Like for example there's a few people buying GTX 960's here but they only have 2GB of VRAM. This might be an eye opener but here is my laptop, one assembly open in Inventor, 1080p resolution, and a bog standard sample model in Showcase, and I'm using well over 2GB of VRAM. One assembly and one showcase model is too much VRAM demand for a GTX 960.
At 4K resolution, with just Inventor alone it was using 1.8GB of VRAM with the system in total using 2.1GB.
VRAM is important, the new GTX 1080 has 8GB of VRAM.
I'm not sure if some of the GTX 960s have 2Gb and some 4Gb but we use the one pictured below. I took a screen shot of the typical assemblies I work on and quantity of models I usually have open at any given time with MSI running. We are going to be building 4 more of computers and are planning to use the same GTX960. with what you just said do you think a GTX 960 is undersized for what we are doing?
Just looking to get opinions before we spend more money
Ah right they must have done a 4GB version too, I basically did a GTX 960 search and most of the hits came back as 2GB which I assume is the more popular card as it'll be cheaper.
It was probably a bad example to use as there's a load of people out there running older gen cards i.e. the 6 and 7 series, as well as A LOT of companies out there still using the Quadro 2000 which was a popular card in HP Z Workstations for a while as well as Dell Precision T3500 models which only has 1GB of VRAM.
@mmaes Is that definitely GPU memory you're monitoring there? My MSI reports it as "GPU Memory" but it could be different per card. It's probably not my place to tell anyone how much VRAM is enough, one day you might need to work on Showcase and get a 4K display and all of a sudden you're using 5GB VRAM... it's hard to say. From my testing though, Inventor under normal use uses around 750MB-2GB VRAM at 1080p so you're probably alright at 4GB. The GTX 970 had a VRAM scandal about a year ago when it came out that it only actually had 3.5GB so I don't know if that applies to the 960 too.
As long as you're aware that VRAM is a thing and you're monitoring it (looks like you are) then you should be fine
@Anonymous wrote:
you completely reason inventor is requesting CPU and GPU not, I tested my post on a GTX 470, GTX 780 and a Quadro 5000 sli, the score did not move too much, for I oc against the cpu it is the day is night, I'd like to see a test with a dual XEON CPU 🙂
tu as entierement raison, inventor est CPU demandant et non GPU, j'ai testé sur mon post une GTX 470, une GTX 780 et un sli de Quadro 5000, le score ne bouge pas trop, par contre des que j'oc le cpu c'est le jour est la nuit, j'aimerai voir un test avec un double CPU XEON 🙂
Inventor cannot use and does not support dual Xeons. There was a test already done with dual Xeons, 20 cores and 40 threads, its score was lower than my $550 budget PC.
@Anonymous wrote:
Neil es ce que Inventor supporte le sli ou le crossfire
Neil are what Inventor supports sli or crossfire
Neither I'm afraid. No benefit of having SLI or crossfire.
@tom_vierling I finished my skylake build and it doubles the score of the hp Z-420. Although I decided to wait for the 1070 to be available but in the mean time a put an old Quadro 4000. I will put the results of the benchmark without GPU and with GPU as @Neil_Cross mention, the GPU does not have a big impact on performance.
For the build I used an Asus Z170AR Mobo, i7 6700k CPU, 32 GB Corsair Vengeance 2666 MHz, Samsung 950 Pro Series 512GB M.2 SSD for OS, Samsung 850 EVO Series 2.5" 7mm 1TB SSD for storage, Corsair H105 CPU cooler, Corsair RM850i 850W 80PLUS Gold Modular PSU. At the moment the CPU is not Overclocked, but it will be, I will let you know the results for comparison
This is the benchmark of my Z-420 workstation
This on is the new buid WITHOUT GPU,
This in the New build WITH GPU
All the best.
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