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advice on graphics cards


kevinrooney

Question

any advice eon which graphics card works best with vectorworks

NVIDIA® Quadro® K4200 4GB (2 DP, DL-DVI-I) (1 DP to SL-DVI adapter)

or

AMD FirePro™ W7100 8GB (4 DP) (3 DP to SL-DVI adapters)

Both seem to be about the same price But so much conflicting information

running vectorworks architect with renderworks

Any help appreciated

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Generally you will want a graphics card geared towards gaming, the Nvidia GeForce series or the AMD Radeon series.

Quadro and FirePro are marketed as being for CAD but they confer no direct benefit to Vectorworks and they are extremely expensive. A list of cards I would recommend can be found in this article about 4K displays:

http://kbase.vectorworks.net/questions/1274/Using+High+Resolution+Displays+

A few more specific details can be found here:

http://kbase.vectorworks.net/questions/1139/Video+Card+%7B47%7D+Graphics+Card+Guidelines+for+Vectorworks+-+Oct+20%2C+2015

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To improve my MacPro, I decided to exchange my original ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB with a new one with 3 GB RAM. I also installed more RAM, from 18, to 36 GB.

Before I exchanged the cards, I took a rendering test with Fast Renderworks. The file is available at Nemetschek, "DC_Riverside_Site-LOD_300" and quite heavy, 564 MB.

The Radeone GB 5770 card used 4.5 minutes to render the view.

After having installed the 7950 card with 3 GB ram the time was 6 minutes!

This result was not as expected. So, can anyone tell me why the result went out worse?

And, is there situations when using VectorWorks where the result should improve? May be when using OpenGL?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

No, a graphics card (or GPU) does not affect Renderworks rendering times. Renderworks relies completely on the CPU.

Your graphics card would improve the speed of 3D wireframe and OpenGL 3D views only.

As to the render time difference, make sure to do the initial render after opening the file, then also another right afterwards and compare. Often the first render after opening a file will be significantly slower as it has to do a large geometry phase that will be cached and save time on subsequent renders. When I do render time comparison tests here, I do the initial render, then two more after and average the times unless they're wildly different and need more tests.

Make sure you're also rendering in a viewport and on a sheet layer as well, since zoom level and display size in the design layer can affect render times directly even though the quality may appear similar.

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No, a graphics card (or GPU) does not affect Renderworks rendering times. Renderworks relies completely on the CPU.

Your graphics card would improve the speed of 3D wireframe and OpenGL 3D views only.

Here I am shopping for a new desktop rig, and I was reading all about Quadro cards vs Geforce etc ...

I'm glad I saw this thread because I was leaning toward the more expensive "Workstation" cards.

The info about Renderworks vs OpenGL is eye opening. I would have thought the rendering engine would lean on the GPU.

OK back to the shopping board.

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Jim,

I'm going to push this a little further.

I started out just buying a PC, but now I'm going to build one from scratch more suited to my needs.

AMD R9 390x Vs R9 Fury

What I'm reading is that in the gaming world the Fury only becomes better than the 390 when running very high resolutions. So if you're playing Fallout 4 at 4k then it will start to outperform the 390.

How does that play out in the VW reality?

The old adage was buy the best video card you can afford, but the Fury is $200 more than the 390 and if VW is not taking advantage of the high bandwidth memory then I'd prefer to save the money. Plus adding the second radiator that comes with the Fury (I'm already planning on running a 240mm radiator for the CPU) pushes me into a full size tower instead of a mid tower.

Not to mention the planned upgrade next year or so of adding a second card in crossfire needing room for a 3rd radiator.

Have you tested VW with the R9 Fury and is there any advantage?

Thanks

Here's the theoretical build list

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/dMdPmG

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Currently since only OpenGL and 3D wireframe benefit directly from an improved GPU, those are the only areas you will see a difference until more things like Top/Plan are moved over to the VGM and start using your graphics card as well.

On a card to card comparison, the best way is to check the Cinebench R15 OpenGL score (this is very similar of a test to how our OpenGL works) but I can't currently find a list of scores for the R9 Fury series.

Going by just their specs, the advantage seems to be about a 10-20% in favor of the Fury, but mainly as you mentioned at higher resolutions where all of the VRAM would be put to use. As far as Vectorworks is concerned, the differences would also be based on the resolution of your screen and how many screens you were using but at 1080p or 1440p I doubt you would notice a difference between the two in VW.

However, as a lighting designer do you use ESP Vision? Then you may want to be going for as much power as you can get your hands on.

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1 hour ago, JimW said:


It started being moved over in 2017, more of it still needs to transition however. For instance, the orange highlighting and viewports on sheet layers are still handled by an older system.

Is this why the bug where the pre-highlighting is offset for perspective/camera viewports hasn't been fixed? Is it being bundled into this work instead? Its been around for a whole version now.

KM

 

5a201f8b63c1e_ScreenShot2017-11-30at7_09_52AM.thumb.png.97a14846d8566ac1a561522e23197e03.png

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So what's the solution for working around the issue of VW slamming on the brakes as soon as I start plating?

 

Assuming the same maxed out GPU, RAM, SSD, would you recommend:

  • i7 4-core 4.5Ghz
  • W-2145 (Xeon) 8-core 3.7Ghz
  • W-2155  (Xeon) 10-core 3.3Ghz
  • Something else?

 

I'm trying to find a balance between modeling, plating, and rendering speed in my workflow.

 

I recently built a Mac Pro 5,1 12-core 3.46Ghz system with a 1080 Ti, 64GB RAM, 1GB SSD and 2x 4k displays. 3D modeling speed was great. 3D rendering speed good. Plating was as slow as ever.

 

Assuming top/plan view etc. will move to the VGM by 2019, around the same time the Mac Pro is released, I'm really just looking for a solution for the next year or so. BTW I'm fully aware that a Windows machine would be a better solution (especially for the money) but I'm stuck on a Mac for the near future.

 

Edited by Mark Aceto
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Sorry, that must be slang for Sheet Layers: light plots, ground plans... 

 

It seems particularly slow when I have 3+ viewports on the same sheet layer: plan, front, side, iso...

 

So I'm looking for a solution to make that part of VW go faster (until it moves to the GPU).

Edited by Mark Aceto
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
4 minutes ago, Mark Aceto said:

It seems particularly slow when I have 3+ viewports on the same sheet layer: plan, front, side, iso...

 


Ah gotcha, those still have not been moved to the VGM, so unfortunately NO hardware you can throw at Vectorworks will make that any faster at the moment. Technically it's linked to CPU core speed but even going from a 1GHz core to a 5GHz core for this wouldn't make much perceptible difference. Once sheet layer graphics are moved to the VGM, it will be dependant solely on your GPU.

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4 hours ago, Mark Aceto said:

Sorry, that must be slang for Sheet Layers: light plots, ground plans... 

 

It seems particularly slow when I have 3+ viewports on the same sheet layer: plan, front, side, iso...

 

So I'm looking for a solution to make that part of VW go faster (until it moves to the GPU).

Out of curiosity, can you describe what is making it slow? The quantity of geometry? Lights? or something else? How does it act slow (eg. moving around, redraws)? I have some pretty geometry heavy models and I haven't found sheet layers particularly slow so I'm wondering if maybe something else is amiss with your files.

Kevin

 

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Thanks, Jim. This is extremely helpful, especially with all of the conjecture surrounding this issue.

 

Last question: are there any best practices for not making this issue any worse? For example, fewer viewports on sheet layers, reduce textures, wireframe vs openGL vs hidden line, sheet layer page size, viewport DPI...? I've made a habit of dimensioning as much as possible on a Dimensions design layer (in plan view) so it's one less cause for annotating a viewport on a sheet layer. Likewise I've started annotating notes and callouts either on design layers, or on top of viewports on sheet layers---basically anything to avoid editing, panning, zooming or just plain working with a viewport on a sheet layer at all.

 

Just stabbing in the dark here but if there's anything I can do on my end to speed things up, and make life easier by working around this issue, please advise.

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@Kevin McAllisterEditing, panning, zooming... all have huge lag, and will redraw the geometry (along with the weird ghosting you mentioned above). All of my colleagues are experiencing the same thing. We fly through 3D modeling on design layers, and dread plating the sheet layers because Vectorworks comes grinding to a halt. It feels like pan, wait a second. Double click, wait a second. Zoom, wait a second. That's why I thought the issue was with the graphics card but a 1080 Ti didn't help much.

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30 minutes ago, Mark Aceto said:

@Kevin McAllisterEditing, panning, zooming... all have huge lag, and will redraw the geometry (along with the weird ghosting you mentioned above). All of my colleagues are experiencing the same thing. We fly through 3D modeling on design layers, and dread plating the sheet layers because Vectorworks comes grinding to a halt. It feels like pan, wait a second. Double click, wait a second. Zoom, wait a second. That's why I thought the issue was with the graphics card but a 1080 Ti didn't help much.

That sounds pretty bad and not very typical, especially given your system info. I would encourage you to submit a file to Tech Support. Perhaps there's a corrupt object (or objects) or some heavy geometry in some of your regular assets. I have seen that type of behaviour before but its usually because of a specific cause, like a symbol containing a sweep where the segment angle is set too low.

 

One thing I've done when things get slow is turn off the pre-selection highlighting.

 

Perhaps @JimWhas some other suggestions.

 

Kevin

 

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Reporting back here with some findings...

 

Been using an iMac Pro 3.0Ghz 10-core CPU, Vega 64 16GB GPU, 64MB RAM machine for a few weeks now. Haven't tried rendering yet but I frequently get the spinning beach ball of death "Application Not Responding" message a lot (Activity Monitor reports the good old "using 125% of CPU"), so I can say without a doubt for any work that you're doing in design layers, get the fastest single-core clock speed CPU that money can buy. VW is absolutely CPU-constrained on a single-core before you ever get to  rendering on multiple cores. That said, if you're on a Mac, you have to choose between clock speed (iMac) and GPU (iMac Pro) for now.

Edited by Mark Aceto
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