Revit 7.0 Video Card Issues

[mwenta]

I have a Dell Dimension 380 with 2 Gigs of memory and I have a Quadro FX 500/600 video card with 128 MB of memory. When running 6.1 I had no video issues; now with 7.0 I have all kinds of issues. I have ghosting issues and it seems as though when ever a complex image that has alot of computations to do, Revit will shut down, not freeze up but shut completely down. I'm finding that I'm having to save after every change that I make to keep from losing information. I don't believe that this is a 7.0 problem; I honestly believe that this is due to the video card. We have another machine in the firm with the identical setup as mine with the identical problems. We have another machine setup with a G-Force 5200 with 120 MB of memory and he has no issues at all. Mine has slightly more memory but with all the problems. My question is this; is anyone else running the same video card and if so have you had similar problems? Were you able to correct it short of replacing the card? Finally; was something done to 7.0's graphics to cause this to happen? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[FK]

Search around the forum for pointers. Make sure to download the latest build of Revit and latest drivers for the card. Then play with graphics options in Revit.

[sdjordison]

I've got the same problem. I just bought a new Alienware notebook with a 256mb nvidia geforce 6800 video card. While using Revit 7.0, the application will shut down. However, on my old dell notebook, this is not a problem.

[mwenta]

FK, Thanks for the pointers but we did all that and still had the same problems. Both myself and another user have been running on the GeForce 5200 for about 2+ months now and have to this date experienced no problems like we did before. The problem is definately with the video card.

[Wes Macaulay]

So you've been to Dell's website to get the specific drivers for your video card? Don't use nVidia's drivers -- your video will not work properly...

[dg]

So you've been to Dell's website to get the specific drivers for your video card? Don't use nVidia's drivers -- your video will not work properly...

Thanks for that tip.

I recently had to do a complete reinstall of windows and used some drivers from Nvidias site. I have a dual monitor set up - one analogue, the other digital, and I noticed that the analogue monitor was not as clear as before.

I downloaded the drivers from the card manufacturers site, and it's a big improvement.

[Wes Macaulay]

Aye. I'm the local "use the right driver" freak. 'Oh, there goes Wes talking about nVidia drivers again.'

But I can't live with anything less than 100% from the computer... use the wrong drivers? No way.

[KMM]

Does anyone know what is the best video card for all the Revit series? Where should I go for the best drivers, Autodesk site or video card manufacture site.

We tried the fireGL series 3300 and crashed the software, replaced it with a Radeon 700 from an old system and seems to be working okay for now.

Help

[iru69]

This is currently a very frustrating situation - there is no "perfect" video card for Revit... with each Revit release in combination with each video card driver release, any number of cards may or may not work. I just posted problems I'm having with a FireGL V3400 video card and the latest build of Revit that didn't exist with the previous build of Revit.

That being said, the most consistently working video card series remains the ATI FireGL V3xxx and the nVidia Quadro FX5xx. But problems to varying degrees have been reported with just about every video card at one time or another.

Autodesk doesn't provide drivers, but they "certify" certain driver versions as being compatible with a specific version of the software. That doesn't necessarily mean that's the "best" driver to use, but in theory, it's a guarantee of compatibility. For desktop machines, you can almost always use both the driver provided by the video card manufacturer, as well as the "reference" driver provided by the video card's chipset manufacturer (ATI/AMD or nvidia)... use whichever one works best for you (i.e. doesn't crash!). Finally, Wes has posted quite a big about third-party "Omega" drivers - do a search for more info about those.

Best of luck to you!