Hardware Performance Questions

[photography67836]

I am using dual Athlons, and I think they are 2.0 Gigs each. I was thinking this would be a powerhouse machine for Revit, but I am finding that processes are getting pretty sluggish lately.

Furthermore my video was supposed to be smokin' fast with a GF4 Ti 128M card. It is getting quite jerky even with the medium-sized house projects I am working on.

Does anyone know if the dual processors are being used, and if there might be ways to tweak performance, ie. virtual memory paging file size?

Windows XP Pro, 1G Ram.

Thanks,
Jason

[christopher.zoog51272]

Hi Jason,

Revit the program does NOT take advantage of dual processors. To revit, it looks like you only have one Athlon MP 2000+ (~1.5 ghz) (Unless you really have athlon mp 2800+ which are actually 2.2ghz, but i would think that would be smokin machine) So all the model changes are being handled by a single processor, you can see this by watching the task manager. Also revit primarily uses processor power to regenerate views. Even with openGL on, the power of the video does not come into play as much as you would expect.

However, accurender embedded inside revit DOES use both processors, so renderings will be twice as fast as a single processor machine.

With a gig of ram, you shouldn't be paging at all, but you can check that, again through task manager. I have a 1.25 gig of ram on an dual athlon MP 1900+ box and even with my largest file, a monster 50 mb central file, I'm only using 700-800 mb of ram.

To recap, revit is a bear of a program as far as performance goes, it's all about the processor baby, then ram, then video card. These are just my observations, not backed up by any official testing…yet.

HTH,

Z.

[Steve_Stafford]

Don't overlook the more subtle issues...like networking, if your are networked and are still using 10bT hubs and NIC's for example...any recent changes in your IT infrastructure that you might be unaware of can introduce variables you might not expect.

I say this because we recently upgraded to gigabit hubs etc...and ironically we had a slowdown until the culprit was isolated (I don't recall otherwise I'd share).

Another approach, purging a file and or saving as a new name will shrink file size drastically.

As other threads attest, there are a number of modeling decisions that you can make that might make a project more sluggish than expected. Compound walls that use integral sweeps are one such feature, at least some have experienced issues with them.

HTH

[Wes Macaulay]

Hey Jason! Try these out:

Do you have OpenGL acceleration on under Settings... Options? Also, turn off surface patterns for walls, floors and roofs in the view. Than can be a real drag.

Also, esp when working with non-workset projects, I've found that Revit can start to bog. It's the REVITTEMP file getting big - you should quit Revit at that point and come back in. I've mentioned this in this earlier post because I've had the same problem, too.

[sbrown]

I would recommend bumping up to 2gig of ram if you can, we just got new machines. Intel 2.4 xeon processors with 2 gig of ram. They work very well, but revit still bogs down all the time, unfortunately NO machine in existence can speed revit up in some areas. But these are the best we could come up with. They are far better than are p4 2.8gig with 1 gig ram, with revit I believe its all about ram.

I don't think the expensive graphics card improve anything in revit. Don't waste your money there. If it does I sure haven't seen any proof of it.

[hjackson1796]

I'm sure glad I read this thread. I'm about to buy a new system, and from the posts here I get that differently than Autocad for instance, Revit relies on the processor speed, not as much on the graphics card for processing screen images with open GL settings maximized.

From this I conclude:

Buy the fastest processor I can afford. Question: is there a difference in performance between an 800MHz and 500MHz bus speed as far as Revit is concerned?

Same formula for RAM. 1-2Gig recommended.

A mid range CAD level graphics card is sufficient as far as Revit is concerned. The new Nvidia 500 for example.

Comments on these additional questions:

Pentium or Athlon?

Hard disk speed a factor? RAID array make a difference?

Henry Jackson - Palo Alto CA.

[Wes Macaulay]

Buy the fastest processor I can afford. Question: is there a difference in performance between an 800MHz and 500MHz bus speed as far as Revit is concerned?

Same formula for RAM. 1-2Gig recommended.

A mid range CAD level graphics card is sufficient as far as Revit is concerned. The new Nvidia 500 for example.

Comments on these additional questions:

Pentium or Athlon?

Hard disk speed a factor? RAID array make a difference?

Henry Jackson - Palo Alto CA.

My experience: RDRAM is the fastest, get the 800Mhz bus if you can afford it. Athlons are okay but burn up if you're not careful -- check out my post about AMD chipsets in the hardware section. Hard disk speed helps to some degree - don't worry about RAID unless it's for the network drive where it will help. I highly recommend the nVidia cards with Revit - they work very well!

HTH

[mlgatzke]

Actually, we're running Revit on Dell 1.5GB Precision Workstations with W2K on it, with 1GB of 800MHz of Rambus RAM and a FireGL video card. They're actually moving along quite nicely. They do start to exhibit a little decrease in speed when the larger models near completion and get more detailed. However, all and all, they're moving along quite nicely.

[Michael Coviello]

Don't overlook the more subtle issues...like networking, if your are networked and are still using 10bT hubs and NIC's for example...any recent changes in your IT infrastructure that you might be unaware of can introduce variables you might not expect.

I say this because we recently upgraded to gigabit hubs etc...and ironically we had a slowdown until the culprit was isolated (I don't recall otherwise I'd share).

Another approach, purging a file and or saving as a new name will shrink file size drastically.

As other threads attest, there are a number of modeling decisions that you can make that might make a project more sluggish than expected. Compound walls that use integral sweeps are one such feature, at least some have experienced issues with them.

HTH

Hi Steve,
I'm curious to know how much improved your network speed is after switching to gigabit? I'm assuming they are gigabit switches not hubs? . Anyway, I'm considering upgrading our 10/100 network to gigabit, and i'm interested in your thoughts. thanks