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.

[mmaes]

I swapped out my old GTX580 for the 4Gb GTX960 today, did a real quick overclock on the GPU and got a pretty good gain.  Results below.

[Neil_Cross]

Holy testicle tuesday 

Those frame rates tho! That just goes to show, I've got the GTX 970 and can't get anywhere near those frame rates.  You're king of the castle right now, those scores are insane.

What's your CPU running at? Are you running my registry hack? 

[mmaes]

@Neil_Cross No Reg hack, only thing in Inventor changed was application options set to default...CPU at 4.8, and the GPU Core Clock +100Mhz and Memory Clock +300Mhz.  This is the EVGA 4Gb SSC (1342 Boost clock out of the box) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487155

[proj964]

@mmaes 

Nice score...I was wondering if you could run it again with just 16GB of memory instead of the 32GB?

Jon

PS Could you share the GPU overclock settings?

PPS Is the CPU overclocked as well?

[mmaes]

@proj964 I still had my case open so took one stick of RAM out and re-ran with basically the same results.  That being said my 3200Mhz Ram is only running at 2933 (how my Bios loaded it with out stability issues)...I know there is some tweaking I could do to get it running above 3200 but haven't had the time to play with it.

[mmaes]

As a side note, we are building another one of these PCs with all the same hardware tomorrow.  It will be interesting to see if the results are the same as one would think they should be.

[proj964]

@mmaes

Thanks for the quick rerun -- wow --

If you look back at @Anonymous results there are now two systems that would suggest that inventor doesn't know what to do with the extra 16GB of memory...

[proj964]

@mmaes we look forward with anticipation to the new hardware build results...

[Neil_Cross]

More RAM just doesn't make the PC quicker, glad thats been shown there.

After my budget PC build you've now got me wanting to do the ultimate Inventor PC build... must... resist...

[proj964]

@Neil_Cross COME ON NEIL....give in...we all benefit!!!Resistance is futile!!!

[Neil_Cross]

Jon, RAM doesn't work like that. No application runs faster in a system with more RAM, it's only beneficial to increase RAM if you're using more than you have. The bench test doesn't use much RAM at all so even if a system had 8GB it will get the same results as it would if it had 64GB RAM, if Windows and all apps are only consuming 5GB then you'd have 59GB just sitting there waiting to be used by other programs. I've got 32GB in my PC and I don't think I've ever used more than 16 of it at any one time

[Neil_Cross]

Please don't encourage me because I would actually do it!!

[mmaes]

@Neil_Cross but what is the "ultimate"?  The highest achievable score on here or the ability to open, rotate, and work with very large assemblies and make drawings of said assemblies? 

For me the ultimate machine could handle very large assemblies and do so in a timely fashion AND have the ability to generate drawings of those same large assemblies quickly.  The bench tool is a great way to learn and see how different hardware has an impact on how inventor works but I personally would love to see a bench tool utilizing VERY large assemblies with a lot of unique parts...for me that would be the real test. 

All that said I have seen huge gains since we started playing with different hardware but I am still not 100% sold on whether or not the Geforce (gaming cards) are without a doubt better than the Quadro cards when dealing with massive assemblies (simply because no real test has been done to prove one way or another).

[mmaes]

@Neil_Cross I constantly use more than 16gb RAM and I am not sure exactly why.  On top level models I am maxing out my 32gb even to the point where some models will not open, I will get a "out of memory" error.

I just replicated it on one particular model I was having problems with last week and still have not figured out why.  I was able to easily open the same model with my laptop that has 32GB RAM and a quadro card (never got over 12GB Ram with that computer).

EDIT: After the "Out of Memory" window I get this window

[Neil_Cross]

Sh1t the bed, what the hell are you working on? In my previous office I had guys working on massive (product size) underwater vehicles, running into 30-40k document occurances, and the systems they had weren't all that great... 16GB RAM in most cases.

Regarding the Quadro query, I'm 100% convinced that a gaming card is better suited for Inventor.  I've had one of the lead devs confirm that Inventor actually doesn't use any Quadro specific features or benefits, underneath the name is the same old GPU chip used in a GeForce card, so the only real world benefit of using Quadro/Firepro is the certification and extra reliability that comes with the Pro cards.  I've got the Firepro W9100 card here and have put it in a PC and tested a big real world assembly with it, there's no gains to be had over the GeForce 970 which I tested on the same assembly.

Talking about the 'ultimate' Inventor PC, you're right I don't think there is an ultimate PC because everybodies use case is different and people have different needs.  Hopefully when Pieter matures the bench test tool into testing more areas of Inventor, then we can get a better idea of what the best all rounder would be

[Anonymous]

Wow. I'm impressed what the community here can do. 🙂 I was looking for an answer about wether using a GeForce or buying a Quadro for Inventor 2016, but i didn't expect to find a whole benchmark tool.
I will run it asap and post results.

[Neil_Cross]

If you're running a 980Ti, almost any Quadro card would be a downgrade for you for Inventor.

[Anonymous]

I ask myself why many companies are still using Quadros for thousands of dollars instead of the GeForces. My ASUS card gives a chicken feed of 750 € or even a Titan X with 12 Gigs will do a cheaper job. Furthermore a lot of AIB Vendors give 3 or more years of warranty (e.g. EVGA or Zotac). And the drivers support DXGI as well as any OGL extension (Inventor is DX, right?). So what is the benefit of using Quadro card instead of GeForces for the Inventor??? I just don't get it.

[Raider_71]

Hi @Anonymous

Here is a fun video to watch which should also clear a few things up: https://youtu.be/U5Npt1BSF04

Hope it helps.

[Neil_Cross]

It's just business isn't it.  Businesses want to use the professional grade products.  Also, Autodesk only certify drivers for the Quadro & Firepro cards and only test internally using Quadro & Firepro, therefore companies tend to go with Quadro because of this certification.  All Quadro cards are manufactured by NVIDIA and go through a much higher level of quality control than the GeForce cards which are handed over to the third party board vendors to tune and tweak as much as they like...

Quadro and Firepro do have some unique features over GeForce but Inventor doesn't use those, so other than "being safe and certified" there's no reason to go for Quadro.  But that's quite a big reason.  I still spec workstations with Xeons and Quadros for the drawing office I manage, it's a large global groqing company and I can't put GeForce cards in here, I know I could go to Ebuyer or Amazon and build a PC for a fraction of the price which rund much quicker but in a professional drawing office they value the Precision or Z Workstation brand and warranty/support.