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High spec PC to run VW2017?


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Any advice on creating 'the best' VW PC? Looking to upgrade my pc in next year.

For example is it worth installing an ssd rather than a hdd to run programmes from? I 've noticed that my Lenovo laptop with sdd seems to run nice & smoothly.

Any advice on graphics cards also appreciated. I'm aware of the VW suggested system requirements, but wonder if there is a 'step up' from this?

thanks

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Yes, you should go with an SSD for your main drive and your main applications, a secondary regular HDD is fine for longer term storage since the space is so cheap these days.

 

This is a list of the graphics cards that we deem excellent for running Vectorworks, as opposed to the recommended minimums, I try to keep it updated regularly:

http://kbase.vectorworks.net/questions/1385/Technical+Support+Graphics+Card+(GPU)+Recommendations

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

No dual GPUs for us for the foreseeable future from what I have heard so far. It certainly is an avenue to keep an eye on especially with Vulkan allowing cross platform multigpu support but for now Vectorworks can only use one.

EDIT: But yes the 1080 would be better for Vectorworks not only in performance but also value for money compared to ANY Quadro currently available.

I'm going to try and get my hands on the new AMD cards that come with the MacBook Pros and bench them as well, but so far only the Intel ones are available. If they handle wel I will be adding them to this list.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I was thinking of putting up a Buyers Guide at least on the Mac side, for which models I recommend and don't recommend. This is nearly impossible for full machines on windows since there are literally thousands of models but from Apple there are maybe 40 total so i could make a definitive list. If anyone would be interested in that, let me know.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Your best bet for that actually already exists, Maxon's Cinebench tests rendering with the exact same engine we use, and their GPU bench tests OpenGL specifically, which gives you nearly one-to-one results for how well it plays with Vectorworks, I highly recommend it:

 

https://www.maxon.net/en/products/cinebench/

You can also often google the Cinebench results for common hardware. However, I have requested that something similar be available from us directly.

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On 11/7/2016 at 3:33 PM, JimW said:

Yes, you should go with an SSD for your main drive and your main applications, a secondary regular HDD is fine for longer term storage since the space is so cheap these days.

 

This is a list of the graphics cards that we deem excellent for running Vectorworks, as opposed to the recommended minimums, I try to keep it updated regularly:

http://kbase.vectorworks.net/questions/1385/Technical+Support+Graphics+Card+(GPU)+Recommendations

 

Is there any way to put up some VW score alongside the recommendation.  You are recommending both the GTX680 and GTX1080 - but I am assuming you recommend the 1080 more.  It would be fun to see what the Jim VW Recommendation Multiplier is.  (I guess that is what the benchmark is for).

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On 11/7/2016 at 4:02 PM, JimW said:

I was thinking of putting up a Buyers Guide at least on the Mac side, for which models I recommend and don't recommend. This is nearly impossible for full machines on windows since there are literally thousands of models but from Apple there are maybe 40 total so i could make a definitive list. If anyone would be interested in that, let me know.

 

This could be useful.

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On 11/7/2016 at 4:12 PM, JimW said:

Your best bet for that actually already exists, Maxon's Cinebench tests rendering with the exact same engine we use, and their GPU bench tests OpenGL specifically, which gives you nearly one-to-one results for how well it plays with Vectorworks, I highly recommend it:

 

https://www.maxon.net/en/products/cinebench/

You can also often google the Cinebench results for common hardware. However, I have requested that something similar be available from us directly.

 

What is a good score?  I got a 71.39...  I decided to run it in "Real World" conditions and not cancel out of background tasks.  

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Anything above 30 I would consider minimum acceptable, anything 50 or above is generally fine for medium loads but above 70 is where I recommend users aim to help with not only performance today but futureproofing for a year or two. A sample of my internal testing (Hasn't been updated with a lot of newer hardware yet):

Screen Shot 2016-11-15 at 12.23.28 PM.png 

Screen Shot 2016-11-15 at 12.23.48 PM.png

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

This is another good general reference for checking graphics card performance, but it doesnt yet include a lot of the last year's GPU releases. Any of the scores where the cards are marked "Overclocked" in the notes should be taken with a grain of salt, because sometimes the overclocking community does things I wouldn't recommend to my users. (like custom liquid cooling with liquid helium ;) )

 

http://cbscores.com/index.php?sort=ogl&order=desc

Screen Shot 2016-11-15 at 12.28.01 PM.png

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  • 2 months later...
  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
3 hours ago, MRD Mark Ridgewell said:

Hi,

I'm now looking again at spec for new PC. Useful information here about graphics cards & SDD.

Any advice on a good pc/ processor?

 

thanks!

Mark

 

if you can post some of the models you are considering I can give detailed feedback, it's difficult to properly list off specs in a vacuum.

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On 2/7/2017 at 2:27 AM, MRD Mark Ridgewell said:

Hi,

I'm now looking again at spec for new PC. Useful information here about graphics cards & SDD.

Any advice on a good pc/ processor?

 

thanks!

Mark

Here's the build I'm currently buying parts for.

When this is totally done, and tested I'll do a little write up here.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Q44Wyf

This website has been to much fun.

This machine is a bit overkill, but hey if you're going to kill, you might as well overkill right?

:)

So if you don't plan on overclocking the CPU you don't need the liquid cooling.

Also if you don't want race car speed in the name of stability you can choose 1 SSD drive instead of the 2 I have spec'd in a RAID 0 configuration.

You can get a really good VW machine for under $2k

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On 11/7/2016 at 4:02 PM, JimW said:

I was thinking of putting up a Buyers Guide at least on the Mac side, for which models I recommend and don't recommend. This is nearly impossible for full machines on windows since there are literally thousands of models but from Apple there are maybe 40 total so i could make a definitive list. If anyone would be interested in that, let me know.

I'd be extremely interested.  I'm hoping that they refresh some of their desk-tops soon!  

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
3 minutes ago, Aspect_Design said:

I'd be interested too.  I'm in a position where I need to make a decision - at the moment it's between a 12 core dual 3.46 Mac Pro from OWC or look at a 10 core broadwell pc. Does anyone have any experience with either on VW2017/

 

What are the graphics/GPU options on both of those machines, and what kind of work do you normally use Vectorworks for?

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Hi Jim - thanks for teh quick reply,

The OWC has an HD 5770, but aI have a flashed GTX970 in my draw I used on my old 3,1 that I would install. The PC I have at present is an i7 6700k , 32gb ram and a GTX1080 - which on paper should rock, but I don't know if its windows or what, but it is extremely jerky. Changing a setting in the OIP would see it flashing several times for something like windoor, updating section properties or updating a viewport. Performance on the PC seems to degrade over a sesion where you have to zoom in and out to show attribute changes to an object; but the cruncher is just crashing completely randomly - I've had to set an auto back up to every 5 mins cos it could go for hours or 10 mins without 'unexpectedly quitting'. By comparison, my wife's late 2009 iMac is rock solid and reliable if not a little slow understandably! I have swapped parts to try and rule out a hardware issue, but it seems to me its VW on windows - no matter if its a fresh win10  install with the bare min of software or an insider preview (naughty i know!) on the i7 6700k - hench the query about the 10 core monster - more cores =better performance? 

I still have a Revit license as I have some projects still needing work to be done on them due to construction changes, and it to on this machine is faultless - except begin horrible to use ;)

I do a lot of top plan work for the bread and butter work that doesn't need modelling (I built the i7 when on 2016 for a faster single core use on top plan) and an equal part working in 3d. I'm not doing a huge amount of rendering - the i7 tends to take a while, so only do it when I need to - but would like to do more for sure.

Cheers!

Edited by Aspect_Design
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
9 minutes ago, Aspect_Design said:

i7 6700k , 32gb ram and a GTX1080

 

If these are your current specs, hardware is most likely not your problem at all. Post the following from your machine please:

 

 

and I can take a closer look. Also, tell me under Tools > Options > Vectorworks Preferences > Display what you have Navigation Graphics set to and if when you change that settings and try similar edits to geometry if you get that same flashing or not.

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Hi Jim,

dxdaig attached. I've had it on 'best performance' so I'll experiment with other settings. I also hackintoshed this machine earlier and it ran extremely well - the only difference wad a different hard drive (windows on M.2 NVMe). 

Getting more back on topic and away from my issue (sorry!) what would be the consensus on the 10 core Broadwell now that top plan is multi core aware and future work on the VGM? 

Cheers :)

 

DxDiag.txt

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Navigating around in Top Plan uses the GPU when in Best Performance mode and is multi core (GPU cores) aware, but it does not use one or more CPU cores. Math and geometry operations (regardless of the view you're in) are still CPU-only and are only single core.

 

More and more things are going to be offloaded onto the GPU in the future since the performance gains are significant so the GPUs importance will only increase.

 

As for troubleshooting testing, disconnect one of the two monitors, reboot the machine. When you launch Vectorworks (leaving the Navigation Graphics where you had them before this thread) does it still lag and flash or does it behave differently?

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Wow... with one monitor disconnected it is working flawlessly. Even doing operations on the file I'm currently in that would just crash it now work (create joists)... i'm kinda attached to my two 27" Dell's tho...

Re the cores, for more top plan/3d work a higher ghz per core is better than a lower ghz 6-10 core cpu? From what I've looked into the multi cores like the broadwells really only come into their own when rendering?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
14 hours ago, Aspect_Design said:

Re the cores, for more top plan/3d work a higher ghz per core is better than a lower ghz 6-10 core cpu? From what I've looked into the multi cores like the broadwells really only come into their own when rendering?

 

TECHNICALLY that is correct, but these days the difference is so negligible that you would be hard pressed to notice it. You might see the difference in math/geometry calculation speed between a single 1.8 GHz core and a single 4.5 GHz core but once it gets much closer than that it becomes difficult to measure the difference really. For Renderworks renderings it is almost always better to have more cores than higher clock speed.

 

EDIT: The multi monitor performance/instability issue is a filed bug, it seems to be more common on Windows but I have seen slowdowns on Mac as well that are way more severe than would be expected for the increase in GPU load from two monitors. I will add your post to the case.

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