Inventor not using the GPU at all

[Anonymous]

Hi!

I'm quite happy with Inventor, but sometimes it's as slow as FreeCAD is and I don't understand why.

It's never using more than 40% CPU Power and the GPU is in idle all the time.

Especially when I do a lot with patterns and fillets it's very slow. Sometimes it takes 30 seconds for a fillet to create it.

Does somebody know what could be limting?

Also, the Inventor Benchmark Tool is not compatible with Inventor Professional 2019, so I could not use that unfortunately.

My system is a Mac Pro Mid-2010 with

Intel Xeon W3530 4x2.80-3.06GHz

8GB DDR3 ECC-RAM

Samsung SSD 830 with 256GB

ATI Radeon HD5770 with 1GB GDDR5 Samsung RAM

Windows 10 Pro 64-bit with the newest updates

Inventor Professional 2019 Build 136

Thanks a lot for every help!

[pball · Accepted solution]

Inventor in the modeling environment is mostly single threaded, so you will not max out a multi-threaded cpu doing modeling operations. If you can check the utilization of each cpu thread you'll probably see one or two being maxed out and the rest mostly idle. Also Inventor does not use the gpu for anything other than generating views, so low gpu use is normal.

That is not a bad computer but the Xeon cpu with it's lower cpu clock is not as good for Inventor which works better with higher clock speed cpus like 4+ ghz i7 cpus.

[Anonymous]

Thanks a lot for your fast answer.

[dgorsman]

CPU isn't bad, as mentioned, but 8 GB RAM is insufficient for most design work these days.  16 GB is more appropriate, especially running modern software on Win 10.

Also as mentioned, the GPU only puts "stuff" on screen, but a GPU with only 1 GB VRAM is pretty low.  That might mean the card is also old enough to not properly support the modern display technology (e.g. DirectX, assuming you're running dual boot and not emulating).  However, since Macs are somewhat notorious for difficulty in upgrading you might have to stick with what you've got.

[Anonymous]

With Firefox and Inventor opened and working on a huge Part, 5.1GB of RAM is used.

The Graphics Card is not loaded at all. It's at 0% Usage, so it does not make sense to upgrade that. That's probably not a Graphics Card issue but how Inventor works. DirectX is of course supported by the card, up to DirectX 11. That's what Autodesk recommends for Inventor.

That the GPU is mostly not used is not good for a CAD program.

I furthermore don't believe that an upgrade to an i7 with 4GHz would improve speed much. If the tasks run at 3.06GHz or 4GHz... it's not a big difference.

If Inventor would use all eight cores (or the GPU)... THAT would be a difference!

[pball]

Actually the cpu makes all the difference. The youtube channel TFI has a lot of Inventor specific videos and one of them takes the same exact computer and runs the cpu at different clock speeds. There is also a video on how much does the graphics card affect Inventor performance. The owner of that channel is also a huge poster and supporter on the forum, I can never for sure remember his name here (sorry).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovoNmspO8L4

You'll have to watch the video to get the full context of this screen shot, but the evidence is pretty clear. 3.4ghz to 4.6ghz is nearly a 50% increase in fps being displayed.

[johnsonshiue]

Hi @pball,

It is not true that Inventor is single-threaded in modeling environment. Most of the geometry compute operations are multi-threaded and multi-core. For example, the Boolean operation and Offset operation are MT/MC enabled. However, Inventor would not parallel compute an Extrusion and a Shell feature at the same time. It is because the Shell has to be computed after the Extrusion. The feature dependency is indeed serial in nature.

Below is a list of MT/MC enabled workflows in Inventor.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/inventor-products/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcartic...

Many thanks!

[Anonymous]

Thank you pball!

This is a nice comparison, but still I'd have expected something better then that. When I create a circular pattern with two features (an extrusion and a fillet) and an amount of 50, it takes up to one minute for the creation.

With a 5GHz processor and an increase of 50% it were still 30-45 seconds to calculate the pattern.

I don't see why I should upgrade to an expensive i7 for 300 dollars just for such a small increase. I thought that maybe there's a setting that's wrong in my inventor, but if there's no setting, I think all we can do is waiting for multi-threaded pattern and fillet creation.