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]

Thanks @pball that's exactly why I explicitly asked to link the video when people ask about graphics cards here.  It's not the fault of @nutral - even though there's reams and reams of evidence in this thread showing how irrelevant the GPU is, it just all gets buried into the back of beyond here and we can't expect anyone to read through what is now nearly 1500 posts! 

But @nutral yes I do have a RTX 2080Ti, I've actually got two of them (I need to send one back as its faulty) and as my beyond conclusive evidence in the video shows, its no better than my 1080Ti, which was no better than my 1070, which was no better than my 970.  Although the 970 has VRAM limitations but that's another thing.

But the RTX founders edition cards look frickin baller in the case, so for me that makes it worth buying (thumbs up emoji)

[Anonymous]

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@leowarren34 wrote:

I feel if inventor did support CUDA then we would get much better results but even inventor isnt fully multi threaded.

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Please NOT Cuda! The last thing we need is some proprietary software solution that excludes competition. I am facing that with Matlab already. OpenCL or nothing!

[nutral]

I know it doesn't matter in inventor. But i was curious if there might even be a negative effect.

For a new pc i generally don't spec the high end gpu. but having more than 4gb of vram is good. The AMD RX480 doesn't run great in inventor though.

I guess that would be a gtx 1070 (or quadro P2000) and in the future when they aren't available the rtx 2070?

For autocad and inventor use, the quadro's are not that great. after the p4000 there are diminishing returns, but the p4000 is 850€. I haven't found a benchmark that also has the 2070 or 2080 in it. If the 2070 performs near the same, that would be a good option.

I have the evga rtx 2080 Black, looks pretty good altough a bit tacky with the large iluminated letters.

[leowarren34]

Oooo, thats interesting, nice to see how diminishing going for the high end gpus are...

[Neil_Cross]

The chart above isn't of any use to anyone unfortunately. 

Not only is it AutoCAD, but it's AutoCAD 2016 which is going to be completely unsupported in 3 months time, no company should be using it now or thinking about buying new hardware for that version, there's been 3 release cycles worth of major performance enhancements since then too. 

Not only is it AutoCAD 2016, but it's AutoCAD 2016 tested at 4K.  The AutoCAD team didn't implement 4K optimisations until the 2017 release.  Not only is it AutoCAD 2016 running at 4K, but it's also a 3D AutoCAD test... everything prior is fact, this next bit is my opinion, and that is that anyone interested in buying 90% of the cards shown in that test to use for 3D in AutoCAD is doing life very very wrong.  If you have the money and the need for a high end GPU for 3D work, AutoCAD is not the program you should be doing it in.

I do love and massively respect Gamers Nexus, they're one of if not the only gaming tech press outfit who I admire, but they messed up that test a bit.

On a side note, I find it curious that nobody ever includes Inventor when they're doing these kind of "workstation productivity" tests, they always shoot for SWX, Creo, Catia, Max, Blender, NX, but Inventor is never mentioned. 

And I'm kinda fine with it staying that way tbh.

[leowarren34]

Is Inventor one of the few programms unlike the ones @Neil_Cross listed that doesnt care about GPU after a point and CPU cores beyond 6 for general use, I know blender scales pretty well but not sure about the others.

[nutral]

This was the only one i could find. The reason a certain set of software is usually tested is because those are included in specviewperf, which is a benchmark suite. Toms hardware used to do tests on inventor, altough from my experience their testing can be hit or miss.

For piping, industrial plants and piping infrastructure. autocad plant 3d is used, which is 3d in autocad. it is far superior to inventor when used for piping. Even more with larger installations and using 3d scans. There is no alternative to autocad 3D when using piping. i've sometimes even seen when autodesk is asked to make their routed systems better, they just refer you to plant 3d...

Those models is where autocad gets bogged down and where graphics cards run out of memory or don't accelerate enough. Altough like with inventor this is also hindered by a single thread running on the cpu.

The only 4k improvements i've seen is scaling and having higher resolution icons etc. Altough they didn't do that at all for plant 3D.

[leowarren34]

Poor inventor being left in the dust for other programs...

[Ryan_Richt]

[stevenL2ZFM]

Hi.

Any chance you could have a look at my results, that would be greatly appreciated 🙂  

Any thoughts on what my bottle neck is? Is it worth getting a new Graphics card?

I often work on heavy assemblies, often with point clouds and T&Pipe assys / frame genereator assys.

Thanks ahead of time !!

Steven.

[Anonymous]

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@stevenL2ZFM wrote:

Hi.

Any chance you could have a look at my results, that would be greatly appreciated 🙂  

Any thoughts on what my bottle neck is? Is it worth getting a new Graphics card?

I often work on heavy assemblies, often with point clouds and T&Pipe assys / frame genereator assys.

Thanks ahead of time !!

Steven.

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First, Id suggest watching the video he posted last week, its very informative.... (and his post saying that he wouldn't be participating in the thread any longer)...

However, if you'd like my opinion... your "model save time" is really slow, so you should check where Inventor is installed and where your saving files (If its the WD, that's your problem). because your other results look pretty comparable.. you may also want to look at upgrading your RAM, if possible. It is pretty slow at 1333.

[pball]

That score looks good for an i7-4790 cpu. Inventor performance is mostly tied to the cpu speed so upgrading your graphics card will not improve performance.

If you want a thorough guide on building a good Inventor computer please check out this thread. The cliff notes would be get the fastest single threaded cpu.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-forum/buying-the-right-workstation-for-inventor-au-2018-clas...

[cfagerst]

It seems that the sticks running at 1333MHz are actually Kingston Hyper X 1866Mhz sticks. Invbench may detect the actual speed wrong though. Check with cpu-z or similar what speed your ram is actually running at. It seems that the other two sticks are Kingston HyperX 1600 Cl10 sticks. You might get all sticks running 1866 or more, if your able to adjust the timings, speeds and voltage in the bios. If this is a branded non custom built system, you're out of luck on the adjustability part though. Faster memory speed will most probably not do much for inventor performance then again, as it's seriously bottle-necked by CPU single-threaded performance, as stated many times before in this thread, and explained in great detail in Niel C:s excellent video mentioned.

Upgrading GPU will most likely do nothing for this test at least. You might gain something if the largest models you are using now, makes your GTX 780 run out of its 3GB of vram. This can be monitored with gpu-z, and conclusions drawn from there.

The "best" upgrade for this particular system would be to replace the i7-4790 with a i7-4790K, as the 400MHz gain in clock speed is what inventor likes the most. The price/performance gain ratio on such an upgrade is questionable though.

[Neil_Cross]

The 4790K is a proper little trooper, still holds its own today, in the early pages of this thread most of my benchmarks where done using the 4790K whilst it was the top dog before the 6700K took over.  With a modest overclock, the 4790K could reach 11-12 in this test.

I would still expect a stock 4790 to perform better than that though, there may be some software level activity causing a slight slowdown somewhere.

[leowarren34]

The 4790 is a trooper, best cpu for it's time overall the system isnt bad but to get any major improvements means alot of money as hex+ cpus are new chipset requiring new ram and motherboard, the GPU should only be upgraded if VRAM is being used up and always save to SSD preferably NVME, thats the short hand, High speed, Good RAM, Good Storage.

[AlexanderHöhe3632]

Hi Guys,

i wish you a happy new year!

While the new year starts, i have got my new PComputer for Inventor. Thanks a lot to the user in this thread. Its the best help you can get today for a new Setup if you dont want go Mainstream.

From a 2012 Precision Notebook (Inventor Bench 5.7) to a i7-9700 is unbelivable. Last year it Needs About half an hour for simulate a radial fan, now ist done in 3 Minutes. 

And here is the new Benchmark. I wonder a littel bit, couse someone here got nearly the same Setup. Differences are, he uses Inv 2019 and a Quadro. His Results are a bit lower? 😄

Inventor 2019 Results will follow as soon as possible.

[Anonymous]

I see that your rater ram speed is 3200 while mine was only 2133. I actually did some tweaking after I posted and enabled XMB in my bios to take advantage of my Ram's 3200 rating. Now my results are pretty similar to yours.

[leowarren34]

I'm surprised RAM speed has made such a significant difference.

[AtleOdegaard]

I am researching my new workstation and I have a question for the experts: 

Is there any reason not to choose the i9-9900K over the Xeon? 

It looks better on all points as far as I can tell, and it even has 2 extra cores. I realize Inventor benefits the most from single thread performance, but when rendering in Inventor Studio all cores are blazing. 

Disclaimer: I apologize if this has been answered earlier, this thread is just too long to read through 

[Anonymous]

Wouldn't it be nice if the time was included in the results, the test took from start to end. That "time" is most important to us, no? I wonder if time result would be inversely proportional to IPI