Revit 2010 sluggish with complex views

[yehuda]

Hi,

My neighbor is an architect. She works from home, doing small projects for private people and the local council. She currently uses some ancient CAD+ derivative software and plans to buy the Revit Suite 2010 soon.

Though I personally am not familiar with CAD software, I often help her with computer related issues, so she asked if I could figure out the hardware requirements and later help her set up the software.

So I downloaded and installed the Revit Architecture 2010 trial on my personal computer. Of course, I can't do any real work on it, but I've been playing with a sample project from the Autodesk website.

The hardware requirements for this program are quite modest so it came to me as a surprise how sluggish things become once I load up a complex file. Truly barebone stuff, like the early steps of the "getting started" tutorial, is no burden and the views are generally smooth and responsive, but this sample really bogs down the system:



My concern, I think, is with the 3D acceleration part -- it doesn't seem to make a difference. I experience considerable lag moving around in 3D views and zooming in and out on 2D views with lots of details. It feels as if the entire area is calculated in software -- the same feeling you get playing a first-person shooter on Intel integrated graphics -- regardless of the state of the Direct3D checkbox in the options menu.

Here are my specs:

Gigabyte G31-based board
E8400
2 x 2GB DDR2-800
Western Digital GreenPower 1TB
ATI 4670
Windows XP 32 with the 32-bit edition of the program.
Windows 7 RC 64 with the 64-bit edition.

This is a screenshot of what I call a complex 2D view:



And this is one 3D view that takes anywhere from 500 to 2000ms to respond to mouse-wheel zoom:



At first I thought something could be wrong with my card or drivers, because I had also tried the integrated Intel graphics and, if I recall correctly, it felt more or less the same. But today I installed the program on another computer with an NVIDIA 8600GT and my experience was just as sluggish.

At this point I'm not sure if what I face is actually an issue or just the way the program behaves. I checked on the Task Manager and GPU-Z and no part of the system was maxed out in parallel with the slowdowns. The graphics card was mostly idle, too. Can anyone suggest if this is normal?

Thanks,
Yehuda

[btrusty]

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet...linkID=9240618

make sure you have "supported drivers" if you expect any 3d acceleration.

[yehuda]

Thanks for the link btrusty but I don't think it covers Revit. I checked the FAQ that is linked to from that page and it doesn't list Revit:



Anyhow I downgraded to Catalyst 8.11 driver under XP and it didn't make a difference.

Do you work with Revit? If you do, can you share your experience with that sample project file and let me know your hardware setup?

Any more input will be most welcome! Thanks.