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Follow-up, here are Cinebench R15 results with the Nvidia GeForce GTX970 external-GPU solution I set up for my Late-2012 Mac Min. (Note, the CPU scores are a bit low because I was running many apps in the background, did not attempt to optimize.)

ubbthreads.php?ubb=download&Number=14657&filename=Screen%20Shot%202016-03-12%20at%2010.02.18%20PM.JPG

So far the card runs flawlessly in all parts of OS X, including Vectorworks.

I hope it's possible to one day move more of the compute-intensive tasks, e.g. hidden-line, polygon, and CineRender (Renderworks) modes onto GPUs.

Edited by Gilbert Osmond
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

YES an external GPU success! i have high hopes for this letting older/weaker hardware last a lot longer and go a lot further.

I'm a huge proponent of moving work to the GPU as well, a lot of this depends on our licensing agreements with MAXON however, which I hope we can push harder on the future.

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More GPU support would be fantastic. I understand that there are programming & structural issues that may or may not be possible to overcome, i.e. GPUs are not general-purpose compute units.

But aside from the GPU question --

I've spent the last day or so carefully observing Vectorworks to learn exactly where it is CPU-bound, and I am pretty disappointed to regulary (*usually* it seems) see VW using only a single CPU core (out of 4 available) when doing basic operations & geometry updates / re-renders.

I gather this by carefully watching Activity Monitor: I almost never see VW take more than 100% of CPU, [which means 1/4th of the available 400% figure.] Am I missing something or have I misconfigured something? I've checked all my preferences carefully.

Having VW regularly use all (or a configurable number of) CPU cores would yield instant 200-800% speed increases in many operations I would think.

If there is a better thread to discuss this in please point me to it, thank you.

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I've read through that (previously) in detail.

I think my main wish is for wire-frame to become multi-core aware.

As follows:

When I am working OpenGL mode, pan/tilt/rotate axes all flow very smoothly with my GTX970 graphics card assisting them, even at highest quality settings.

Where it still lags is in *zooming* in/out, specifically and only. Here's what I think the problem may be: the GPU is handling any pan/tilt/rotate movements alone because it has the full model loaded into it already.

But when I zoom in or out of the model, the wireframe has to be re-calculated for the shift in perspective. Specifically on *zooming alone,* I watch Activity Monitor and see the Mac CPU bounce up to 100% (out of 400% possible, i.e. 4 available cores).

If wireframe became multi-core-capable I bet the hiccups & pauses on zoom in/ out in OpenGL mode would disappear.

I should note also that this zoom lag is independent of OpenGL quality settings. High or low, anti alias or not, etc. don't make a difference. That confirms for me that the lag is in the CPU as it deals with recalculating the wireframe geometry when zooming.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
I am pretty disappointed to regulary (*usua

I gather this by carefully watching Activity Monitor: I almost never see VW take more than 100% of CPU, [which means 1/4th of the available 400% figure.] Am I missing something or have I misconfigured something? I've checked all my preferences carefully.

Having VW regularly use all (or a configurable number of) CPU cores would yield instant 200-800% speed increases in many operations I would think.

.

This is correct. The speed scaling won't be a perfect Cores-to-percent increase but it's still massive.

The main issue is that while rendering and much of the 3D viewing in Vectorworks is multicore or GPU based,the component called "Core" that handles math, geometry and generally all calculations is still single core. No matter how many cores you throw at it, it will use just one.

The more complicated models get and the more powerful multi core CPUs get the more obvious this becomes. By some specifc performance metrics, Vectorworks runs at the same speed on a Core i7 cpu from 2016 as it would on a Pentium 4 from 1999.

This issue is only going to become more important and obvious as time goes on until we transition to full multi core processing. ArchiCAD recently devoting resources to this bodes well for us doing it sooner and while I HATE being reactive vs proactive when it comes to features, I'll use any leverage available to me to lobby for this improvement.

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I really appreciate your frankness & confirmation on this JimW.

Having this info helps me avoid fruitlessly throwing a lot of money at hardware in an attempt to make VW faster -- i.e. in "core" computation it's not going to make a revolutionary difference using a Mac Pro w/ multiple Xeons vs. a core i7 2.6Ghz. Only an incremental difference not worth ~$3-$4K.

Of course VW remains fantastic in so many other ways, I'm not complaining, just hoping that in the not-too-distant VW gets full multi-threading/multi-CPU awareness in the "Core" functionality.

As far as marketing & the annual product cycle go, of course this is not as sexy a feature as, for example, ENERGOS, point-cloud import, curtain walls, and much else -- but for the existing user base of VW it would be a *major* boon to take full advantage of existing hardware.

Edited by Gilbert Osmond
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I want it bad. I pretty much constantly harass our CTO here about it, but the reasons it hasn't happened yet are legitimate. It is coming, but it is an extremely huge undertaking since it requires the re-testing and possible tweaking of almost every single tool in Vectorworks.

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