slow regen and moving when shaded

[ccaviel]

running autocad 2012

modeled a piping package and the very slow. MY spec are amd 1090t, asus crosshair iv, firepro v5700 crossfire, 3 sas 15k raid 0
16gb 1600 ddr3

the file is 32 mb and it slow to move once shaded and looking for some advice. followed several threads on setting autocad up and making it fast. little improvement. amd claims my file is small and the cards can run it

[dgorsman]

We are still a long ways off from hardware that can do real-time design work in a fully shaded display mode (even on the highest end CGI movies they do all the design in wireframe, not rendered). AMD is likely going on the basis of video games which use a huge number of internal pre-coding and internal "cheats" to make it look good, but which don't apply for technical work.

Regardless of your hardware, wireframe will always be fastest. Use the rendered visual styles for rendering stills, use something like Navisworks for real-time walk throughs.

[arshiel88]

Graphic cards help a lot in navigating in shaded modes specially when Hardware acceleration is enabled (which you must make sure of it to use the full potential of your graphics card). I'm not sure if a powerful processor and high memory specs will help in this situation but if it does, I guess not much.
I am not familiar with ATI graphic cards but I searched FirePro 5700 and it says 512MB memory GDDR3. Is this correct? If that so, having a 32MB 3D Model, you might want to consider upgrading your graphics card, with at least 1GB GDDR5 memory.
For now, just make sure you have the latest drivers installed and hardware acceleration is enabled. There's an icon of it at the lower right corner (a memory icon with a light bulb - if they don't change it from 2011).
Also, check the specific visual styles settings. Turning off the Intersection Edges ease it a lot. My models are less than 10mb usually but I still need to turn this off in shaded modes.