What does the Video Card actually do for Revit 2011??

[cconley530]

Okay clarification,
Does the video card strictly help the visualization of the program or does it actually help Revit run smother as a program? From what I have read it does not matter what video card you have for the rendering part but, (what is) affected by the video card.

The reason I ask is that we have a 150MB project with a ton of groups inside and sometimes when we modify a group my system goes into (Not Responding) forever it seems. We have a very crazy circular ramp 11 stories high with different floor to floor hieghts.

System Specs. Brand New machine
Dell XPS 8300
3.40 gigahertz Intel Core i7-2600
64-bit
Multi-core (4 total)
Hyper-threaded (8 total)
AMD Radeon HD 6700 Series
12.0 GB RAM
Windows 7 Home Premium (x64) Service Pack 1 (build 7601)

[Ed Jobe]

Any video card is responsible for drawing the graphics on the screen. In the case of 3D graphics, this is more complicated because the desired 3D model has to be converted to 2D to display on the screen. If your card (and especially important is the driver) are supported by Autodesk, then the software can use the gc's hardware (GPU) to speed up the 3D-2D conversion process and then the display process. If not supported, the pc has to use the CPU and software to do the conversion and then passes that back to the gc for the display process. The latter is much slower. How much ram your gc has also makes a difference, especially with large models.

[cconley530]

So, buy using the Quadro FX cards because they have supported Autodesk Drivers Revit will be more stable? Or just faster?

My issue is that I came into this project 3 months after it started, I am the so called Revit expert and I want them to buy Quadro FX cards but $450 bucks a pop is hard to get them to do it.

This project has all kinds of crashing going on and so many groups in it it's not funny. I do not agree with so many groups but hey, I am in here after the fact. I just need to figure a way to get Revit more stable. I am assuming that the graphics are being overloaded whenever you edit a group with so much stuff in it. The PC's ad you see the specs above are good enough for the job minus the Video Card it has 1GB RAM onboard.

Is it worth going to the Quadro 2000D 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 for $450 to possibly make Revit more stable over all??

[cdatechguy]

So, buy using the Quadro FX cards because they have supported Autodesk Drivers Revit will be more stable? Or just faster?

My issue is that I came into this project 3 months after it started, I am the so called Revit expert and I want them to buy Quadro FX cards but $450 bucks a pop is hard to get them to do it.

This project has all kinds of crashing going on and so many groups in it it's not funny. I do not agree with so many groups but hey, I am in here after the fact. I just need to figure a way to get Revit more stable. I am assuming that the graphics are being overloaded whenever you edit a group with so much stuff in it. The PC's ad you see the specs above are good enough for the job minus the Video Card it has 1GB RAM onboard.

Is it worth going to the Quadro 2000D 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 for $450 to possibly make Revit more stable over all??

Yep...we are using Quadro 2000's on all our newer workstations...
But...the higher nVidia GTX cards are more than capable as well...and way cheaper. You may have to disable hardware acceleration though...

[Ed Jobe]

We're using Quadrox FX 4800 w/ 1.5gb ram. We chose this only because our IT dept will only buy Dell and this is what they had for workstations. I don't have any experience with Revit, but it makes acad MEP scream.

[sinc]

So, buy using the Quadro FX cards because they have supported Autodesk Drivers Revit will be more stable? Or just faster?

In my experience, neither. As best I can discern, the preference for "workstation graphics" is largely a holdover from years past, with questionable benefits these days. The Quadros do some things differently, which makes them more efficient in some ways, but a lot of that gets canceled out by the higher raw speeds of the "gamer cards".

If you want to try a test, I'd recommend only getting one Quadro (the new ones no longer have the "FX" moniker) and testing it out, to see if it makes any noticeable difference whatsoever, before you roll a new expensive card out into a bunch of machines.

I know Revit is very RAM-hungry, so it's possible that you'd notice a greater benefit from getting more RAM.

[sinc]

But...the higher nVidia GTX cards are more than capable as well...and way cheaper. You may have to disable hardware acceleration though...

I've never heard of any problems enabling hardware acceleration with GTX cards, except for cards with very little RAM (e.g. cards with less than 512MB RAM). However, I often disable hardware acceleration, at least for Civil 3D (my primary CAD package), since there seems to be very little difference in performance in Civil 3D between the two modes (at least with high-end CPUs like Core i7s), and there are artifacts involved with hardware acceleration. These artifacts are usually only seen when zoomed in really tightly and attempting to run commands like CHAMFER and FILLET, but these artifacts affect every card, including Quadros and FireGLs. (They are not related to whether or not a card is a "gamer card".)