New computer/graphics card issues with Revit 2019

[Brad9]

Just recently got an upgraded computer (I also use it for video editing), here are the specs:

Intel Xeon Gold 6226, 12 cores, 2.70GHz

NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000, 8GB

64GB RAM

1TB SSD

Our office is still using Revit 2019 and I am getting a lot of lag/blue spinning circles/etc. when zooming and panning around the overall floor plan in the current school project I am working on. Others in our office with much older computers do not have this problem in the same file. I have tried the newest graphics card driver from NVIDIA as well as the older tested driver that Autodesk recommends for Revit 2019 and both have this issue. The driver available by updating through the windows device manager seems to work a little better, but there are still some issues. 

Is this problem just a result of incompatibilities between new hardware and old software? Or the issue due to the CPU instead of the graphics card? Thanks in advance.

[Lance.Coffey]

Thank you for the question @Brad9!

I would start troubleshooting this by changing the following settings (and retesting after each change):

• Turn off hardware acceleration in the Revit Options –> Hardware (this takes some of the load off the graphics card and puts it on the CPU).
• Turn off the Allow navigation during redraw option in the Revit Options -> Graphics (this option is intended to improve performance, but has been found to cause reduced performance with certain model data).

[ToanDN]

Do you have any additional add-ons compare to other workstations?

[Brad9]

@Lance.Coffey  I tried both options without any luck. My graphics card is probably overkill for Revit, but I'm starting to think my CPU isn't fast enough. Another person in my office doesn't have any issues with this Revit model and is using a much older computer and less powerful graphics card. But theirs has a Xeon 1650 @ 3.60GHz compared to my CPU @ 2.7GHz. Although my machine also has more cores, from what I understand Revit only uses one. So is my CPU underpowered?

[Brad9]

@ToanDN  I don't have any add-ons other than Enscape. But I rarely use it in Revit, usually Sketchup.

[ToanDN]

I don't think your CPU is slow, it blows the water off the Xeon 1650. Clock speeds don't mean much when you compare CPUs from different generations.
https://technical.city/en/cpu/Xeon-E5-1650-vs-Xeon-Gold-6226

Uninstall Enscape see any differences. Also, check see if you are missing any paths for external links (CAD, IFC, Navisworks, texture images).

[Lance.Coffey]

Thank you for the update.

Revit will use multiple cores for many operations, but not all. The following help topic has a list of the multi-threaded processes: Central Processing Unit (CPU) Recommendations

If the CPU was the cause of the slow performance, then I would have expected turning hardware acceleration off to make the performance noticeably worse (i.e. the load that was being handled by the GPU is now being put onto the already overloaded CPU).

Did you notice a change in performance (better or worse) after turning off HW Acceleration?

Since you are using the 2019 version, another thing to check is licensing. If using a borrowed network license, there is an issue that can cause periodic hangups (not specifically associated with panning/zooming but every few minutes: When using borrowed licenses while not connected to license server, 2019 Autodesk products freeze

Note: This licensing issue is specific to the 2019 version so later versions would not show similar behavior.

[Brad9 · Accepted solution]

Wanted to give an update. After installing the current studio driver with a clean install, I ended up contacting Nvidia and they recommended some changes to make in the Nvidia control panel that fixed the problem.

Here is what they had me do:

1. Open NVIDIA Control Panel --> Manage 3D settings.
2. Go to Global Settings tab.
3. In the setting window, change the 'global preset' to '3D visual simulation app'.
4. Also check below settings too,
• Power management mode – prefer maximum performance
• Ambient Occlusion – Off
• Triple buffering – off
• Threaded optimization – ON
• Vertical Sync – Adaptive
5. Click on Save,.

[cmeehan32M3R]

We had a similar issue and and went through all the steps online of updating the graphics card, checking hardware acceleration, telling windows to use the RTX card, power settings and more. Turns out it was Revit's camera. Go to the camera setting in a view and set it to a number that makes sense and the view will reset and the items will appear correctly in 3D.