PC Performance when using Point Clouds in Revit

[Anonymous]

Hi There, So I am having some performance issues when inserting a point cloud into a revit model. Any time I place a point cloud in a file revit freezes every second or two and has a hard time keeping up. (Point Cloud & Support Data are 80mb, Revit File is 40mb) I have tried turning the hardware accelerator on and off and it seems to work marginally better with it on.

I have monitored my hardware performance via task manager and when orbiting through 3D space my RAM jumps to about 50% usage, and the GPU pretty much maxes out (85-100%). I was my understanding that Revit uses the CPU to produce point cloud overlay data, not the graphics card..? I have also tried copying the point cloud files and revit files from our office network drive to my local disk (which is an SSD) and there seems to be no difference in performance..

I am trying to determine what the bottleneck in my system is but these two issues really have me stumped.. 

I have an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 graphics card, Intel i7-8700k 6-core 6-thread 3.7GHz (4.7GHz turbo) processor, 16GB RAM, and 256GB SSD local disk with over 40GB of free space. (Running Revit 2018 on Windows 10 Pro)

[dzanta]

First thoughts:

- Graphics card is not compliant to run Revit

- Cloud files seem very small?  Perhaps your 80MB is just for 1 or 2 files?)

- Is the cloud file an E57 file format?  If so, can you redo scan to make it a RCP (ReCap) file instead?  Revit likes these file better

- Up the RAM to 32GB

For reference:  We have done small scan jobs (5 to 10 scans) and they typically total 8 to 10GB in size...not 80MB.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for your response.

- In regards to the graphics card, I have compared it to some other GPU's that are "certified and recommended" by Autodesk and what I have seems to be on par.. Even though its not a recommended GPU that would still restrict performance?

-  The point cloud I am referring to is already in ReCap format, and when I highlight and review the properties of the support folder, it is listed as a size of 80MB. I just did some more digging into the support files, I located a folder which holds the individual .RCS files (this must be the right one). The size of this folder is 16.2GB that sounds about right in your scan/size comparison. 

- In regards to the RAM, I am only seeing 50% usage in the task manager.. is the remaining space a reserve that is held? Otherwise indicating the RAM is maxed out as well? Hence why you suggested upping the RAM to 32GB right away?

[Viveka_CD]

Hi @Anonymous 

Please see the following articles: 

• Autodesk Revit Hardware Certification FAQ
•  a detailed description for Revit hardware
• Slow performance of Autodesk Products with point cloud files
• @Anonymous has a top tip!  Try to create a new file just for point clouds (1 point cloud = 1 revit file) and link it to your working file. Also create a separate workset for point cloud if you have a multiple point clouds.

I hope this is helpful! 🙂

Regards,

[dzanta]

I found that the GTX cards always gave me problems with Revit/PC until I switched to the Quadro cards.

ReCap support files totaling 16GB+ need to be accessible and in the same relative path location as the RCP files

More RAM is better.  16GB of RAM is very low for this day and age.  Remember, RAM is used by Windows, Autodesk software, all other software, Firewall application, etc.  When I starting doing this type of work, 16GB was always giving me problems.  When I updated to 32GB is helped.  When I jumped to 64GB and then 128GB, I had NO lag whatsoever.