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.

[Anonymous]

I will like that the test bench with the CPU AMD FX-9590 Eight-Core

[Anonymous]

Terrible results 😞

[Neil_Cross]

Interesting result.  I wouldn't get too beat up about the end score, overall you've got a pretty good PC, just the CPU bottlenecking it.  The CPU isn't even a bad one it's just on an ageing platform now, a v0 Xeon from 2012.  You've got enough RAM to open almost anything you'll physically be capable of creating, GPU is too good for Inventor with more VRAM than you'll ever need and I can't see if you have a SSD but if someone spent $700+ on a GTX1080 I assume a SSD was also bought.  I definitely wouldn't be too concerned if I had that system.

[Anonymous]

Yes an SSD is installed. The computer was ment to run Autodesk Inventor and Showcase,.. but in larger parts for example (60.000) the performace sucks in both applications. Till next week i have time to change configuration. Like provided in other posts in this article, it would make more sense to have a 6700K + gtx 1080 or maybe 5960x +gtx1080.  The system is going to run 3ds max as well. Any suggestions here?  Thank you...

[Anonymous]

http://www.tomshardware.fr/articles/comparatif-cpu-amd-intel,2-8.html

[brotherkennyh]

was hoping for better results, but oh well. Will try my 10 year old laptop later just for fun and my FX9590 desktop with an nvme SSD.

[Neil_Cross]

I've recently just put the brand new Samsung SM961 NVMe m.2 drive into my desktop, it's one of if not the fastest consumer available drive on the market with reads of 3000mb/s and 1600mb/s write, it made no real immediate difference to the performance of Inventor over my old budget SATA3 drive.  But obvs overall system performance will be greatly improved.

[brotherkennyh]

Here is my old laptop score. It is an 11 year old dell inspiron 9400. Upgraded with SSD and win 10. For most things it remains a pretty good laptop. I have even been doing 3D unity development on it and it works ok, although a little slow for building projects.

Seems to run simple inventor models ok, but i thought you would enjoy a laugh at the score.

[Neil_Cross]

I think if I was to get Inventor loaded onto my mobile phone, it would score better than that! But based off memory, I think that actually is the lowest score so far in the entire history of the tool being run!

[brotherkennyh]

Awesome. I'm a new record holder!

If you have a Nokia 3210 it will probably get a better score.

Looking forward to firing my desktop up and seeing how close to the top score I can get. Sadly I'm in the middle of moving house and it isn't setup.

[salariua]

---

@Neil_Cross wrote:

it made no real immediate difference to the performance of Inventor over my old budget SATA3 drive.

---

Exactly what I found out... the m2 and hdd in general have no impact on performance.

[brotherkennyh]

I disagree. We have a number of office PCs that we upgraded from HDD to SATA2 SSDs. They all run inventor much faster. My home PCs have also seen similar.

I cant comment on the difference on SATA3 vs NVMe though. Not yet anyway.

[Neil_Cross]

Results can vary based on the health/age/state of the old mechanical drive.  I've got a new Dell Precision T5610 here which had a mechanical HDD in, clean Windows build, general system performance was sluggish and it scored around a 7.0 on the test.

I put in a SATA3 SSD, clean Windows build, general system performance was much better but it still scored a 7.0 on the test.

A lot of these discussions are now lost in the thread with it being so big, but we've already talked about how the test isn't a perfect representation of overall system capability, there's no large assembly performance metric in there which can be something that could be affected by a mechanical storage device.

[andrewdroth]

I just gave it a go on a new build with the 1080 installed. I did the 10 cycle test.

[Neil_Cross]

This is probably the best I'm gonna push out on my old i7 Haswell platform, so far I think 13.45 from @mdavis22569 is top dog.

[mdavis22569]

His should be the default setttings on the GTX1080 right now ...

a little clocking on that and the CPU ..and he should be rocking.

[andrewdroth]

Yeah, mine was all stock.

[Anonymous]

Okay guys, i think i have a massive problem with my inventor performance.

Same PC, different (and much more powerful) graphicscard installed (quadro k420 to gtx 980 Ti) and my fps went DOWN! So the bad performance is not a GPU problem.

I did the test on all the PCs in the office network. They all have much the same cpu and speed and slightly different gpus (K420, K2000, onboard HD 4600). But all the results are the same between 3.2 and 3.8 (see pictures above. equal results on all pcs).

The big problem is, that i'm searching for the problem every time i have a bit of time left at work. but couldnt find an answer for my problem. We are working on a big project here, so our last assembly had around 14,000 parts and the next assembly will have a LOT MORE. When i rotate the camera the FPS (or reflesh rate) number says 2-3 hz all the time. adding parts or assemblys to the main assembly will took a lot of time and everything is VERY slow, so that main part of the construction is waiting for the PC/Program.

I#m a bit lost now, so i hope you guys can help me out 😄

[Neil_Cross]

This won't affect the test, but you've only got 8GB RAM there which isn't enough to handle assemblies in the 14,000 part count ball park.

I'm really curious about your RAM though, you have a 4690K which is a Haswell i5 and they only support up to DDR3 at 1600MHz, but you're using G-Skill RAM which is rated DDR3 at 2133MHz, which I assume is a factory overclock on the RAM.  

That is validated here go down to the memory types area and you'll see.  This might not matter, but it's something.

The bright side is that your performance is pretty good overall, the modeling times and drawing times are in line with what that CPU should be doing, it's just for some reason gimped on the FPS for some reason.

Is Inventor 2014 the latest version that you have access to? Can you upgrade to anything newer?

[brotherkennyh]

regardless of your PC specification you need to track down the bottleneck here.

As you are running very large assemblies, to my knowledge the problem with a slow frame rate in the graphics window is in the calculating of the object positions, which is CPU based and not GPU. Someone shout me down if this is wrong. The GPU takes over after this for the rendering.

From my point of view it would be good if we could push more processing to the graphics card, but I am sure it is no simple feat.

To take a look at the bottle neck try downloading GPUZ or a similar application. It is like a task manager for your graphics card. Pull up task manager next to it and take a look at inventors CPU usage. Most of inventors processes are single threaded so if you have a 4 core CPU it will max at 25%, 8 cores 12.5% etc.

Between the 2 applications you will see the bottleneck of your system. I suspect it is the CPU limitation is the issue and your graphics card isn't breaking a sweat. Your CPU isn't bad, but there are certainly much more powerful options available. See if you can upgrade the CPU for the most powerful supported by the system and see how the performance changes.

Updating your software/drivers couldn't hurt, but I doubt that would make much difference unless there is a particular bug.

Cheers

Kenny