APE Design Ctr Posted October 30, 2004 Share Posted October 30, 2004 Heres a perfect example. I have 2 computers sitting side by side at my desk: I have an old P4 1.8G single processor running a XP, VW-10. 700Megs Ram. I imported a DXF into VW10, and it took .5 seconds. I also have a brand new Dual G5 1.8G Macintosh running OS 10.3, 2 Gigs of RAM, and it took 1.5 sec for the import. Second: I wanted to select all the polygons on the imported object, so I selected them all. The old P4 took about 1 second. The new Mac took 14 sec! Now, just to clarify, the new Mac is screaming faster than the PC in all other tasks including Photoshop work, PDF creation etc. The Mac is not the issue. I am definately disappointed in the performance of VW on the Mac, and I am convinced it is a software issue. Your engineers definately need to take a hard look at some of these issues!! Your software is fantastic, but the speed in OSX is substandard. Quote Link to comment
Petri Posted October 30, 2004 Share Posted October 30, 2004 I run my VW 9 under Classic - simply because of the speed problem in OS X. 'Fortunately' I have some other programs that also require Classic (and no OS X version), so I need to have Classic running anyway. The selection speed (?) is indeed one of the most irritating issues, right after OIP slowness. Quote Link to comment
Kevin Posted October 30, 2004 Share Posted October 30, 2004 This is great information. Now if NNA would please educate us on what the problem is and how to fix it. We deserve honest anwers so we can make informed decisions. I use a Mac for it's ease of use. But I now use most of my time with Vectorworks. Seems to me that if NNA will not give an answer then my only choice is to change over to a , gasp..., PC! If I need to wait for 11.1 or 11.2 then so be it. If OS10.4 is the answer then I will wait. But I cannot wait forever and it does not inspire customer loyalty when NNA will not answer this issue. Quote Link to comment
Jacques Posted October 30, 2004 Share Posted October 30, 2004 APE Design: Can understand where you're coming from. Just as an afterthought...Have you checked your disks etc...repaired permissions? Also, is your energy saver settings set to Highest Performance...? Must say though...even at Automatic it should trash an older 1.8 Ghz Pentium! -JT Quote Link to comment
APE Design Ctr Posted November 1, 2004 Author Share Posted November 1, 2004 I will check permissions, and change the performance setting ... Thanks!! Quote Link to comment
ionw Posted November 1, 2004 Share Posted November 1, 2004 Energy saver allows you to throttle the processor back. It is there mostly for portables to extend battery life, but you can do it on Desktops to reduce heat and thus fan noise. Default is at Highest performance. I don't recall the percentage decrease in clockspeed, but it is noticable. Quote Link to comment
Kevin Posted November 1, 2004 Share Posted November 1, 2004 Ionw; Thanks for clarifying that. It would seem that the energy saver panel for a desktop and powerbook are different. My powerbook has the pull down menu that you speak of and I have now set it to Highest Performance. My desktop energy saver panel is different and does not have the pull-down. I guess the software knows when it is installed on a powerbook and when it is on a desktop unit. I use the desktop for VW, so this hint is not helpful for the slowness of VW. Quote Link to comment
ionw Posted November 1, 2004 Share Posted November 1, 2004 on my destop with 10.3.5 I have the option to throttle the Processor. The speed became a non issue when I popped for the ATI Radeon 9800 SE ($350 @ CDW) All of the Interface redraws, window popup slowdowns disappeared. other's mileage may vary. Quote Link to comment
APE Design Ctr Posted November 1, 2004 Author Share Posted November 1, 2004 Ionw, so you are saying that your performance increased largely with the replacement of the video card. How about rendering speeds? I am finding that there seems to be a lag, not on the actual rendering, but on the preparation of the rendering, or the calculation of the geometry. Sometimes the colored wheel spins what seems like forever. Once the rendering starts to happen it isnt that bad. Selecting polygons takes a huge amount of time rather than the old PC with VW10. Quote Link to comment
Jacques Posted November 1, 2004 Share Posted November 1, 2004 The energy saver setting for the newer G5's will actually affect the processor bus. The term Apple and IBM use is bus slewing. (yep, not slowing, but slewing) It just cuts the bus speed either in half. I think on some machines it cuts it back 1/3. -JT Quote Link to comment
ionw Posted November 1, 2004 Share Posted November 1, 2004 I haven't done extensive rendering tests, but the video card made working in the program snappier. as before if you have a test file, i am happy to run it on my computer and give you my result. Quote Link to comment
Kevin Posted November 1, 2004 Share Posted November 1, 2004 Ionw; Thanks again. I have a 466mhz G4 witht he OEM 16vram video card. After reading your post a few weeks ago I upgraded to a new ATI card with 128vram. Not as fast as your ATI 9800 but should have been much faster than what I had. There did not appear to be any significant difference and I experienced some video glitches with it, so back it went. I have experimented with a Dual 1.8 G5 with the OEM Nvidia card. It is snappier but still slow. It is an improvement but still slow. If you wouldn't mind, try this speed test on your machine. Open a new blank document. Insert a door. Once inserted, the OIP will have 7 unchecked boxes and the pallet will be collapsed. Check the lowest box. Once it expands, check the next one up, and keep this progression until all of the boxes have expanded. On my G4, running VWA11.0.1, it takes about 16 seconds to expand the entire OIP. On the G5 it takes about 12 seconds. I would expect that the boxes would expand as fast as I could check them, but even on the G5, I have to wait for one box to expand and then check the next one up. How long does it take on your G5? Quote Link to comment
ionw Posted November 1, 2004 Share Posted November 1, 2004 I can't get to the next chck box before the last has fully expanded. There is a sub-second hiccup when I click on the top (General) box but is expanded before I could think about entering any data I forgot to mention, I did this with 5 1.5 Mb Large site plans open at the same time. I didn't do anything to speed up the results. [ 11-01-2004, 02:40 PM: Message edited by: ionw ] Quote Link to comment
Kevin Posted November 1, 2004 Share Posted November 1, 2004 Ionw; So it sounds like your OIP is expanding as fast as you can check the boxes. (Did you start at the bottom box)? This is a significant response increase over the stock 1.8 G5. Now that you have this new G5 with the ATI 9800, do you have any speed or response issues? There are a number of threads on this board now relating to speed. The general tone is that the stock G5 screams on other applications, but is slow on Vectorworks. Is this your experience? Quote Link to comment
ionw Posted November 1, 2004 Share Posted November 1, 2004 Yes I started at the bottom. It is not a rocketship, but is a lot faster than either the Nvidia stock card, or the ATI 9600. I have 50 Mb improvement plan that I use as my test. operations that take 2 -3 minutes on either this 1.8 G5 with the Nvida 5200 video card, or on a 1st gen G5 dual 2 Ghz with the ATI 9600 Video card, take 10-20 seconds. These are operations like Select all, zoom and pan, zoom by rectangle. I don't remember the other reults at the moment, but is took 23 seconds to do a select all on over 275,000 objects. I don't have the time today to run the checks on the other computer or video card, but as soon as I get a chance I will post the numbers here. I find that there are momentary slowdowns, but ingeneral it seems very fast. In the the month or so we've had it, the $350 for the video card seems cheap. But yes VW is still the doggiest of my apps. Sketchup, Pshop, Illustrator, Golive, Filemaker. HTH Quote Link to comment
APE Design Ctr Posted November 1, 2004 Author Share Posted November 1, 2004 Ionw, as you mentioned you are busy. Can I send you the same DXF file that I used for import on the opening statement of this thread? Take your time on this. 800K uncompressed, and I would be interested to see how quickly your machine selects all the polygons in the file... Thanks Quote Link to comment
APE Design Ctr Posted November 1, 2004 Author Share Posted November 1, 2004 PS It would be really nice for any VW engineers to add any comments along the way here ... Quote Link to comment
Kevin Posted November 2, 2004 Share Posted November 2, 2004 Jaques; Can you explain how the energy saver setting would affect performance of this program, (or any other for that matter). Your comment has piqued my curiosity. Quote Link to comment
klaus Posted November 2, 2004 Share Posted November 2, 2004 I think the only comments that VW engineers can make at the moment is "don't buy VW if you have a Mac" Quote Link to comment
G-Pang Posted November 2, 2004 Share Posted November 2, 2004 Currently I'm running G5 2.5 DP + 3 GB Ram and still feel Slooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwww!!!. Quote Link to comment
ionw Posted November 2, 2004 Share Posted November 2, 2004 Just a follow up on my tests, I found that if I imported, saved and then ran the same tests in VW 11 I found that I consistently got 30 second select deselect times. Quote Link to comment
Jacques Posted November 2, 2004 Share Posted November 2, 2004 And my output. VW11.01, TiBook 1 Ghz, 512mb RAM ATI Radeon 9000 (64 Megs), OS 10.3.5: Import: 9 sec Select: 35 sec (!!!??? On a 800mhz P3 AutoCAD 2000 it takes 1 sec!!!) Deselect: 36 sec Select all: 35 sec Deselect all: 34 Open GL: Low/Tex: 2 sec Low/Tex/Nurbs: 2 sec Med/Tex/Nurbs: 2.5 sec Hi/Tex/Nurbs: 2.5 sec VH/Tex/Nurbs: 2 sec Final RW: 8 sec I did this test on my Tibook just to show you how SLOW it really is to select and deselct something. Now for somebody who is trying to work on a sub 1 Ghz system, I only have sympathy for, as it cannot be fun! Having said that, OpenGL, and RW seem quite OK for my system. All permissions repaired etc for the test. No other apps running. Quote Link to comment
ionw Posted November 3, 2004 Share Posted November 3, 2004 Speed tests From APE Design Ctr's file Preliminary results Import 4 seconds initial select all 31 seconds initial deselect all 19 sec two successive select all 55 seconds two successive deselect all 55 seconds Open GL low & textures 1 second + lo, texture, nurbs 1s+ med texture, nurbs 1s+ high. text, nurbs 2s+ very high, textures, nurbs 2s+ Final RW 6 sec At the moment I do not know why there is such a difference between the initial and successive selections. Maybe sloppy recording, I will try again later. =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= VW10 in OS 10.3.5 Select 29 seconds Deselect 30 seconds =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= Just ran a quick set of Classic tests VW 10.5.1 & VW 11.0.1 in classic had similar rendering times to the VW 11 tests in OS 10.3.5. Selecting and deselecting was dramatically different. VW 10 Select 2 seconds deselect 3 seconds VW11 Select 5+ seconds Deselect 4+seconds [ 11-02-2004, 12:50 PM: Message edited by: ionw ] Quote Link to comment
APE Design Ctr Posted November 3, 2004 Author Share Posted November 3, 2004 Here are the results of my test: VW11, Mac Dual G5 1.8G, 2G RAM Gforce FX-5200 (64 Megs), OS 10.3.5: Import: 8 sec Select: 18 sec Deselect: 17 sec Select all: 18 sec Deselect all: 18 Open GL: Low/Tex: .5 sec Low/Tex/Nurbs: .5 sec Med/Tex/Nurbs: .5 sec Hi/Tex/Nurbs: .5 sec VH/Tex/Nurbs: 1 sec Final RW: 5.5 sec PC 1.8 Intel P4, 700 RAM, Win XP, VW 10: Import: 7 sec Select: 1 sec Deselect: 1 sec Select all: 1 sec Deselect all: 1 sec Open GL: Low/Tex: <.5 sec Low/Tex/Nurbs: .5 sec Med/Tex/Nurbs: .5 sec Hi/Tex/Nurbs: .5 sec VH/Tex/Nurbs: .5 sec Final RW: 7 sec Now this is interesting: Rendering is faster on Mac, however selection of polygons is up to 18x Faster on old PC. This has to do with geometry calculations as the Colored Beachball spins as it is thinking. Import of the object is about the same speed in both systems. Is anyone else interested in giving this a shot, I would be happy to fire off the file to you. Thanks for all of your help. Quote Link to comment
Kevin Posted November 3, 2004 Share Posted November 3, 2004 Thank you Paul; Ion Webster makes a valuable point. We, as users, are not in a position to throw money around in trial and error attemps at hardware selection. Ion's testing seems to indicate that the ATI 9800 provides a key responsiveness increase. He says that his 1.8 machine with new card is more responsive than his previous 2.0 machine with the OEM card. So is the card the key? And if so, then is more better? We all can look up the comparisons between video cards, but the testing is done on games. I do not know what "Unreal Tournament" is, let alone what frame rates are, and how they impact me using Vectorworks. I just want the OIP to respond as fast as I can click and type. Quote Link to comment
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