Speed... More speeeeeeed please?

[MaleXLR]

I have 25 A3 sheets, most requiring moderately complex rendering, but even when I am not rendering it is sluggish.

I was just changing sheet numbers and it took forever as VW paused for up to 30 seconds after each change.

I am also getting pauses and black screens while changing to another sheet layer.

While this happened I checked my system and VW was using only 8% of the CPU while the system was using another whole 2%.

It's a 64 bit computer with 32GB of RAM and VW was only using 300MB during one of its little "sleeps".

Is there any way to force VW to grab more?

Anyone???

[PVA - Admin]

You cannot currently no, only Renderworks is multicore at the moment. But, this is going to be happening in phases and theres another large upgrade planned for 2017 in the VGM Top/Plan task:

https://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=229491&page=1

[PVA - Admin]

You cannot currently no, only Renderworks is multicore at the moment. But, this is going to be happening in phases and theres another large upgrade planned for 2017 in the VGM Top/Plan task:

https://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=229491&page=1

[MaleXLR]

Hi Jim and thanks for the reply...

I am having speeeeed issues with Renderworks too - especially using artistic edges when it is calculating edges.

The job that I mentioned has custom Renderworks images on most pages and even with two bounces and medium quality it takes hours to publish to PDF... and don't expect to publish to the printer without it crashing every time!

I experimented with an 8GB graphics card and that didn't make a noticeable difference!

I upgraded to 32GB of RAM and that didn't make any difference!

During rendering it seems as though my CPU (i7-2600K 3.8GHz) usage bounces up and down from 100%, but my 32GB of RAM is hardly touched. Is this normal?

Are there tricks to improve rendering times or is this as good as it gets?

I am about to order a new Windows 10 machine and the minimum spec recommendation for Vectorworks aren't very helpful. 32GB RAM seems as if it might be a waste of time, so aside from the fastest CPU with the most cores, where can I find definitive recommendations?

Thanks again...

[grant_PD]

What's your dpi setting? 150 should be sufficient. Graphics cards don't do anything for Custom Renderworks. Only the processor. It's most likely either your settings (too high in the dpi) or you have some crazy errant geometry that's causing VW to do a lot of unnecessary calcs.

[MaleXLR]

I'm running at 72 while working on the job, then wack it up to 300 for publishing/printing, which is what my clients need.

My CPU only has 4 cores and I have just been browsing for 6 to 10 core processors - might be worth the investment!?!

I see that you have a Quadro. Any problems? Our office mainly used GTX760, but tried a Quadro to reduce the number of VW crashes. Anyway, the Quadro crashed more than the GTX760... Oops!

[digitalcarbon]

i second the speed issue.

i await vw 2017 and the speed improvements

however, just to be clear...

on a scale of 1-10, speed or speed/stability (like space/time) is #1

#2 user interface (less clicks) is next (like the new resource palette in 2017)

& navigation (3dconnexion etc)

and everything else is somewhere down around #50 (yes, i know its off the 1-10 scale) and that is my point, all VW efforts should be set to speed/stability across the board.

forget all the nifty features, what is the point if things get so bogged down that your project is trapped in the computer?

[grant_PD]

300 dpi is a lot of pixels. If that's what your client really needs then you are stuck because you will be doubling the processing of the render. In some cases more than doubling if the anti aliasing is cranked up.

Quadros are a waste of time and problematic. I paid a lot for that card and I wouldn't again. I'd get the best gtx gaming card I could.

If you want me to look at the file and see if I can improve the rendering times just shoot me a link.

[MaleXLR]

Thanks Grant - coming right at yer via wetransfer.com

[MaleXLR]

Speed/Stability... if only. #1 would be great, but I'd be happy if it move up from #1,000,000.

We have seven licenses and probably average about five crashes/VW seize ups every day for every user. That's a lot of hours wasted, a lot of time trying to remember what you had drawn since the last crash and a lot of time messing around with VW Backup.

The blame is always put on GPU, CPU, incompatible RAM, out of date drivers, faulty clusters, old BIOS, etc. In fact, anything but Vectorworks!

Funny that none of our other software (including ArchiCad) causes the same problems.

Humph!

[Kevin McAllister]

That's a fair amount of crashing if you're running VW2016. Given what you describe in your initial post I'd say there's something corrupt in your file. I've only ever seen pauses like that with very complex extrudes (e.g. many points in the original geometry) or some auto hybrid objects.

Kevin

[MaleXLR]

Yep... but not just one file - all files - no matter how complicated/simple.

Starting from our template, a standard VW template or a blank file. It's indiscriminate and on all seven workstations - all Windows, but not identical, ie: different HDD, SSD, CPU, GPU, RAM, etc.

Last week I had an urgent job so started at 5am and had no less than a dozen "crashes" before 8am... Is it some form of advanced Quantum Physics that wouldn't otherwise happen if I wasn't observing the process?

[PVA - Admin]

If all of those machines are better than the minimum hardware specs, BIOS and drivers were all updated, and it isn't file specific, then the next thing to track would be conflicting 3rd party software.

Security/antivirals can mess with it badly, but also remote control apps or screen mirroring tech (like AMDs Raptr, LogMeIn, anything that records or casts your screen or creates an artificial display adapter device) can be likely suspects. However, if you've already gone over all of this with their techs, we'll have to see what comes of it if they escalated it to engineering.

[zoomer]

2016 SP3 was very stable for me.

Here it looks like SP4 has much more problems with Graphics.

Hangs for many minutes when closing groups and or Symbols in OpenGL,

when I have a Layer with VP with referenced 2D data in the background.

I think clipping the unnecessary parts made it worse.

Editing 3D Symbols when a clip cube was activated before wasn't fun either.

[Kevin McAllister]

Are you sharing a copy of the same workspace? Same backup drive? Or some other commonality that might be the cause? Maybe a font even?

I can't speak for a PC installation, but my Mac installation has been pretty reliable over the last two versions.

KM

[MaleXLR]

There are common fonts, workspaces and templates - but all are stored locally on each workstations C drive as are the VW Backup folders...

Our main font is "Wastrel" which isn't a standard Windows font, but was purchased as a "commercial" font.

At one stage we did try sharing one workspace stored on the server and that was disastrous and lasted at least 95 minutes and 32.5 seconds before we threw up our arms and tossed out that stupid idea. Great to keep everybody up to date with tools, but palettes jumping around all over the place with some users on 27" monitors, some not and some of us on dual monitors.