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.

[Neil_Cross]

Not to drawing view creation, there's zero GPU influence over that.

The 1070 is more powerful than a 980Ti, so in comparison to a 970 it shouldn't cause any bottlenecks.

I think my score dropping from 12 to 9 might be a case of the PC being stuffed with more crap since then, I've now got SteamVR running on it, dozens more applications running in the background, who knows though but it feels like it's time I jumped on the skylake bandwagon.

[mmaes]

@Neil_Cross with that theory about the GPU and drawing views I would like to see someone run the test with their MOBO integrated graphics and see if the drawing view score changes or not.

[nutral]

You were having a really high framerate on the 970 though, at 270 fps. with my 980 ti i can't reach higher than 180. Usually high framerates are bottlenecked by the cpu and sometimes by the architecture of the gpu. The other top score with a 1070 has about 180 fps with skylake.

[mmaes]

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@Neil_Cross wrote:

On lower end cards running dual monitors does cause a performance hit, but not on the 1070, possibly a fractional hit but nothing noteworthy.

I know this will get lost into the black hole that is this thread, but here's more proof that the graphics card makes little to no difference to the visual performance in Inventor.

Exactly the same PC, exactly the same everything except one run had the GTX 970 and one had the GTX 1070.  The 1070 is magnitudes more powerful than the 970 but look at this...

At the moment I'm at a complete loss as to why my drawing test is now taking 6 seconds longer to compute, it's the same CPU at the same speed in the same PC with the same everything except it has a more powerful GPU now.

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@Neil_Cross I also noticed that the 12.0 score you showed was the same from page 15 of this thread when you first spoke about the "registry hack".  I know when I played with the registry hack the drawing views were a little goofy (showed up as grey blocks for the preview).  I think, based on the numbers shown that you are comparing one system that has the registry hack in play and one that does not.

[Neil_Cross]

Yea that score of 12.0 on my system was with the registry hack on, however even with reapplying the hack, I cannot get my system today with the 1070 to get anywhere near 12.0.  I'm 90% sure the drop in system performance I'm having is nothing to do with the 1070 and more to do with my PC being more congested with junk now than it was back then.  I've got SteamVR for the Vive and all kinds of other background processes chirping away now.  But the two images I just posted there are both with the reg hack on.

Although I can't believe the 1070, which is in every way possible massively more powerful than the 970, is responsible for any performance drop... stranger things have happened.  I've still got the 970 so I'll pop it back in at some point and re-test.

[Mario-Villada]

Here is one with Integrated graphics

this one I added a Quadro 4000 GPU

[Neil_Cross]

Tbh the Quadro 4000 is so old now that it probably isn't that much more powerful than the integrated graphics on Skylake. That PC you have is a potential 12+ Scorer if it wasn't for being handicapped by that old Quadro, you could probably spend $200 on a RX 480 or a Gtx 1060 and remove the graphics bottleneck completely.  

[cad]

Hi all,

this is my test result:

 I am not happy with the Inventor performances. I have ask help to this community in this thread and in this one.

I hope someone can find a clue in this test or advise us something to change in our configuration in order to improve the performance.

 This are the system info:

OS Name: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional
OS Version: 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601
OS Manufacturer: Microsoft Corporation
OS Configuration: Member Workstation
OS Build Type: Multiprocessor Free
Registered Organization: Hewlett-Packard Company
Product ID: 00371-OEM-8992671-00008
Original Install Date: 12/06/2015, 03:57:56
System Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard
System Model: HP Z640 Workstation
System Type: x64-based PC
Processor(s): 1 Processor(s) Installed.
[01]: Intel64 Family 6 Model 63 Stepping 2 GenuineIntel ~1176 Mhz
BIOS Version: Hewlett-Packard M60 v01.55, 23/04/2015
Windows Directory: C:\windows
System Directory: C:\windows\system32
Boot Device: \Device\HarddiskVolume2
Total Physical Memory: 32,675 MB
Available Physical Memory: 25,596 MB
Virtual Memory: Max Size: 81,685 MB
Virtual Memory: Available: 73,077 MB
Virtual Memory: In Use: 8,608 MB
Page File Location(s): C:\pagefile.sys
Domain: unifab.local
Logon Server: \\UFSERVER
Hotfix(s): 319 Hotfix(s) Installed....
Network Card(s): 1 NIC(s) Installed.
[01]: Intel(R) Ethernet Connection (2) I218-LM
Connection Name: Local Area Connection
DHCP Enabled: No

[Daniel248]

Software Graphics enabled ?

Un-tick that box, for a start... 

[cad]

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@Daniel248 wrote:

Software Graphics enabled ?

Un-tick that box, for a start... 

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Yes I have already disabled it. Before it the score was 2.6.
I don't know why it's still showing "enabled".
I tried another test after rebooting the PC and the score is the same 6.1 (showing the Software Graphics disabled).
And the problems remain.

[Daniel248]

Have you selected High Performance in

Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options ?

Check that your processor is actually achieving at least that nominal 2.4GHz rated speed - if not more, when 'pushed' hard - there are many tools available for that, and a lot more advice earlier in this thread...

Also, the Benchmark performance is affected by location of Inventor TEMP file, My Documents, etc.

All these (and the Inventor installation) should be on a fast SSD drive, ideally set as C:\ drive. 

[cad]

I have selected High Performance in Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options this morning and the test result is only a bit higher:

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@Daniel248 wrote:

Check that your processor is actually achieving at least that nominal 2.4GHz rated speed - if not more, when 'pushed' hard - there are many tools available for that, and a lot more advice earlier in this thread...

Also, the Benchmark performance is affected by location of Inventor TEMP file, My Documents, etc.

All these (and the Inventor installation) should be on a fast SSD drive, ideally set as C:\ drive. 

I don't know how to change the CPU settings. I have heard about overclocking but I don't really know if it's safe to do it and how to do it properly.

This is the screenshot of file locations:

Probably part of the problem is the wrong Inventor installation, becau

[cad]

Probably part of the problem is the wrong Inventor installation, because both PCs in the office have a long "Inventor warm start" time.

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

I started at a temp position recently and I am finding the computer very slow.  It seems like it should be a powerful system.  I don't think I have seen a bigger case!

Dell Precision T7500

22 gigs ram

Quadro fx1800

Would swapping out the graphics card or a SSD give the most improvement per buck?

It is painfully slow and the assemblies are not that big.  Any help anyone can offer would be appreciated.

Chuck

[blair]

Inventor is CPU critical. The faster the CPU the faster your modeling will be. A SSD drive will only reduce "Read/Write" wait times. If you are waiting for Features to process and Constraints to "snap", then you need a faster CPU.

[tom_vierling]

Well as they say, size isnt everything!

However in this case its a multitude of things. For one your CPU is five years old, not to mention only running at 2ghz which is important in single threaded applications like the modeling process of Autodesk. Different RAM speeds and capacities, that video card was launched in 2009 (!!!) and scsi hard drives are slower than modern SATA hard drives.

I'd say your computer could use an upgrade or 12.

[Neil_Cross]

(just received notification that others have answered this now, but i'd already typed this out so I'm gonna submit it anyway!)

Sorry Chuck but that PC is ready for the bin.  The CPU in there, the Xeon E5504 was released in Q1 2009, so that PC is built upon a 7 year old architecture.  It's also only 2GHz which is about as bad as it gets for Inventor, there's literally nothing you can do about that.

Replacing the Quadro will make no difference.  Although the Quadro is also terrible, it only has 768MB of video RAM which these days is about what Windows and a couple of standard generic appllications use up, before you even attempt to open any 3D models.

[Anonymous]

Thanks guys...I was afraid that might be the case ( no pun intended). 

I will need to make a recommendation on a replacement.  I will go back through the thread and verify what works.  Probably an i7 with the fastest speed possible, SSD, 16gigs ram & a gaming card.  Should be able to that for not too much money.

Thanks again,

Chuck

[mdavis22569]

@Anonymous

I'm running an i7-6700, SSD, GTX1070 STRIX Gaming card 16 gigs of ram (now 32)... and I did  quite well on the bench test.

 It was just about $1000.00 US for me to build it with a purchased version of Windows 10 professional. 

[Anonymous]

@mdavis22569

"Quite well"  may be understating it a bit!

Chuck