Inventor 2019 not using nvidia gpu

[22TobiasK]

I have recently installed inventor on my laptop and I noticed that it is not running on my Nvidia P2000 Quatro gpu. When first installing it worked fine however after a while I saw that it was not using the gpu. I have tried right clicking on the inventor icon and pressing run with "High-performance Nvidia processor". I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling. I couldn't change the prefered settings in the control panel.
Any help would be great! Thanks!

[Mark.Lancaster]

@22TobiasK

Most likely you will have to disable the on-board graphics card through the machine's bios settings.

[JDMather]

---

@22TobiasK wrote:

 I couldn't change the prefered settings in the control panel.
Any help would be great! Thanks!

---

I think you might need to change in the BIOS.

Did you reboot the computer and the behavior persists?

Is your laptop plugged in (my laptop automatically switches to the discreet graphics when running on the battery)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE6WA2l-14w&t=0s&index=12&list=PLMhqIwDF76hL7JOL06D0Eetqcvb1oYca3

[dgorsman]

Backing up a step... how do you know it not using the GPU?

[leowarren34]

Definitely disable iGPU in the bios and disable in the accelerator, also Inventor isnt very GPU bound however it does love VRAM so GPU usage will be very low... as Neil Cross has said in his AU class you don't need a beefy GPU to run Inventor at it's potential.

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! You may want to update the graphics driver. Along with the driver, you should have a tool called Nvidia Desktop Manager, which can configure what software to run on the graphics card. You want to make sure Inventor runs on Nvidia card.

Many thanks!

[leowarren34]

@johnsonshiue

As Neil has said IV is not very GPU bound it's barely noticable unless you have textures, it's the CPU thats king here...

[johnsonshiue]

Hi Leo,

I am not 100% sure it is true. It depends on the operations. Let me forward it to graphics experts so they can explain it better.

Many thanks!

[leowarren34]

Cheers @johnsonshiue

It's just my experience and others, we need CUDA, I'm saying IV doesnt use gpu, it's just barely noticeable until you run out of vram.

[LishuangLu]

@22TobiasK, it is weird that Inventor 2019 doesn't use NVIDIA GPU, could you let us know whether your laptop is plugged in when it happens? And how do you know that Inventor doesn't run with NVIDIA GPU? Did you get this from Inventor Diagnostics? 

If the case happens when the laptop is plugged in, it should be a problem in Inventor 2019, we need to investigate and fix. Thanks for providing additional information for us! 

@leowarren34, thanks for you comments! In most of the cases that CPU is the key, since it is the heart of the computer, which dominates the programs execution. While, GPU is focus on graphics, any graphics related things, such as what you saw in the graphics window, any interactions will require GPU's support to get smoother graphics frame rate. And, it is not very obvious in small datasets or simple cases. But for large assemblies or complex designs, GPU will be very noticeable by monitoring the GPU bound. A simple case will be creating a large number of component pattern with a simple dataset. 

Thanks, 

-Lisa

[22TobiasK]

Hi,

The laptop is plugged in while the issue is occurring. I know that Inventor is not using the GPU because it is not showing up in the Nvidia "GPU activity" icon. Since it hasn't shown the program ran a lot slower. I have the program set to use the Nvidia GPU but it just isn't doing it.

Thanks,
Tobias

[LishuangLu]

@22TobiasK, so you didn't see Inventor.exe in the NVIDIA GPU Activity dialog? Did you see other applications in the dialog? Can you also check your Inventor Diagnostics information from Inventor Application Options->Hardware? Please paste that information into a txt file then share with me. Many thanks!

[leowarren34]

Heres a screencast, I have a middle class gtx960, not the best, not the worst, IV barely bothered with the gpu that the fans were idle...

[LishuangLu]

Hi Leo,

Thanks for posting the video! I can see that GPU was actively used 30% in you video. This is a normal situation in most of the time for simple design and small dataset. Let's imagine how it goes for a large assembly which is with tens or hundreds of thousands occurrences. Just for testing, you may try to create a 30x30 or larger component pattern based your part and see how it goes.

Thanks,

-Lisa

[22TobiasK]

Hi,

I don't see the program in the dialogue. I can see all other programs when I run them.
Please find the diagnostics results attached.

Thanks,
Tobias

[LishuangLu]

Hi Tobias, 

Thanks for sharing the InventorDiagnostics information!

Indeed Inventor is not using NVIDIA GPU, it is using Intel integrated one, and your inventor is running with Software graphics mode, not the Hardware mode which will lead slow performance.  From your attached diagnostics info, I didn't see the NVIDIA driver info, would you please reinstall the NVIDIA driver by downloading from Lenovo website? After that, restart your machine, then check from System Device manager to make sure that the NVIDIA GPU is showing in the Display adapter correctly without warning info.

And next uncheck Software graphics from Inventor Application Options->Hardware->Apply and restart Inventor. 

Let me know whether it helps. If it is not, please let us know your Lenovo laptop type, we probably need find a similar one to see whether we can reproduce the problem. 

Thanks, 

-Lisa

[leowarren34]

As @LishuangLu said you need to disable your iGPU and enable your Nvidia card as primary, try the newest drivers and use the NVidia control panel to set gpu as main.

[leowarren34]

@LishuangLu

Just did some further testing, added that assembly into a new assembly 10 or so times and ran afterburner again, the result was still 30-50% until shadows and reflections came in which caused speaks of 100% but was normally at 40%

[LishuangLu]

@leowarren34, so for the new assembly with 10 instances, it is still a small one, you can try to increase the instances into 100 or more, you could create an assembly component pattern to increase the instances to the desired number.

This is just for testing purpose, in real cases, eg. for the enterprise customers, typically in their assembly there are more than 10 thousands instances which will definitely requires  GPU's support to get better graphics frame rate for smoother interaction experience.

 Thanks,

-Lisa

[leowarren34]

When I get the time over the weekend I'll run some more testing, see what happens see how many parts make my setup unusable or until its gets tedious.