Revit 2009 WU1 display performance

[Wes Macaulay]

On our end, using the FireGL cards that have historically been great with Revit, we're still noticing that 2009 WU1 is slower than 2008, especially on computers that aren't leading edge with respect to hardware.

Zooming with the scrollwheel in plans, working in 3D... it's all still slower than 2008 was. This is disappointing, though not a deal killer. The update does improve display performance a bit over the initial release.

So what are you noticing w.r.t display performance with Revit 2009 WU1 compared to 2008?

Please indicate the hardware, driver version and operating system you are using. Note that the poll is public so we can see whose hardware works, and whose doesn't!

We are on Windows XP32 with ATI FireGL V3100, 3300, 3400, and 5200 cards with the latest drivers (8.453.1.3), as well as some Mobility Radeons on some laptops.

[Wes Macaulay]

I should note the following response, just in on my display performance support request:

"The team is still aware of existing performance issues - this update was only part of a resolution. They are continuing to work on all-around performance degradation. I will keep you updated as they progress...."

So there is hope that at some point this problem will be resolved. Tracking down issues like this is a task I'm glad I'm not called upon to take on!

[narlee]

I hate to say this, as I'm a huge Revit fan, but I haven't yet felt compelled to upgrade.

[Wes Macaulay]

I hate to say this, as I'm a huge Revit fan, but I haven't yet felt compelled to upgrade.
...because of the display performance? Otherwise, I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want to upgrade!

[iru69]

Windows XP32 with ATI FireGL V3400 with the latest drivers (8.453.1.3). 3GHz Core 2 duo w/ 4GB RAM. Mostly 50 MB projects or smaller.

This is a bit of an update to yesterdays post (in a different thread) now that I've had another day to use it.

With OpenGL on, in a typical 3D view with shadows OFF, performance is maybe 50%-75% of what it was in 2008. It's quite usable, but definitely quite a bit more choppy. I do keep seeing quite a few screen artifacts left over when I zoom in and out, etc.

With shadows ON, performance suffers to such an extent, that it's pretty close to unworkable. I can set the view up and then turn shadows on, but to actually try and manipulate elements is just too frustratingly slow.

We also have the exact same workstation with a Nvidia Quadro FX570 instead, and it's video performance is normal (aside from a few too many occasional crashes).

[ws]

Windows Vista 64 with Ati FireGL V5600 (driver 8.453.1.0) 2.66GHz dual dual-core Xeon 5150, 8GB ram, most projects less than 20MB.

There is a bit of a performance hit under Vista 64 anyway from XP Pro, but I noticed even under XP that RAC 2009 was a bit slower than 2008.

WU1 I don't really notice any great difference in feel - it is slow but even with shadows on orbiting is clunky but usable. The FireGL V5600 is a very powerful card and even with Revit did seem to make a small difference to display speed.

BTW I do notice that under Vista 64 I do not get the OpenGL problems I was having under XP - the first View would not display on loading a project and had to be deleted and recreated to show up.

[iru69]

Update: I've been using the new WU1 for the last couple days and this morning I opened up a project I've been working on and immediately noticed that huge chunks of the model weren't displaying in certain views. It isn't like pieces are dropping out as I spin and zoom, it's literally like they're not there.

Close the project, turn off OpenGL, reopen the project, and the views are back to normal.

Well, so much for WU1.

[narlee]

Quote:
Originally Posted by narlee View Post
I hate to say this, as I'm a huge Revit fan, but I haven't yet felt compelled to upgrade.

Wes:
...because of the display performance? Otherwise, I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want to upgrade!
__________________
Wes Macaulay LEED AP

Well, they re-did the in-program renderer, which appears to be an improvement to AR3, but still slow and requiring a lot of work to get a rendering. If I was ADesk, I would have encouraged Accurender to develop Nxt, which promises to be fast & simple & accurate, leaving the so-called "higher end" Mental Ray users the option of getting 3ds Design Max. I just think the whole strategy is wrong.

The whole steering wheel and graphics thing I don't like, for all the reasons stated in this forum. And, maybe I'm not used to it, but it isn't a hit on this forum, that's for sure.

I have another text graphic problem (minor artifacts).

Other text, dimension & graphic improvements, for my small practice, are nice and will be useful in some circumstances, but not worth the subscription price of upgrades.

It seems (given all the issues, that apparently are still occuring) as tho the development put out what they could to meet a deadline.

I see this release as three things: 1) housekeeping issues for large users, 2) implement some graphics standards they are still working out as platform-wide implementation, and 3) finally update the renderer (which, as mentioned above, to my mind and for my particular purposes, they made a poor & useless choice).

Now...if they'd given us your long-requested 3d loft tool - THAT I would have been impressed with! :)

[Scott D Davis]

the in-program renderer, which appears to be an improvement to AR3, but still slow and requiring a lot of work to get a rendering.

It's actually easier to get a rendering out of Revit with mental ray. We've gone from a few dozen dialog boxes for rendering wit AR down to 3 with mental ray .Speed wise, its about the same for lower quality renderings. It's only when you get into the "best" settings that mental ray takes longer...but the quality is a huge leap forward over AR.

[Wes Macaulay]

Now...if they'd given us your long-requested 3d loft tool - THAT I would have been impressed with! :)

They did -- or 50% of a loft tool. The swept blend meets 95% of the situations that we run into where the other modeling tools would fail. For other firms I realize that a full loft tool was needed yesterday.

As for Steering Wheel (and Scott, you are going to never let me live this one down), I was in 2008 on Friday working on a project that I'm keeping on 2008 because of the display perf issue in 2009, and I was hating DynView. :p

So other than the Up/Down tool on Steering Wheel (which is hopelessly too sensitive), I probably am going to start liking Steering Wheel. <Napolean Dynamite mode on>UGH! I am such an IDIOT!

[narlee]

It's actually easier to get a rendering out of Revit with mental ray. We've gone from a few dozen dialog boxes for rendering wit AR down to 3 with mental ray .Speed wise, its about the same for lower quality renderings. It's only when you get into the "best" settings that mental ray takes longer...but the quality is a huge leap forward over AR.

Thanks for the comments, Scott.

I didn't use AR3 due to its speed. When I see posts about renderings that take hours, I know it's still not a technology that has been "democratized", if you will. I suspect I am one of thousands of small shops who would use rendering on a regular basis if its "price-point" made it reasonable. By "price-point" I mean how much time & effort are my modest clients willing to pay for; i.e. how much saleable value do they derive from it? To my mind, a great in-program renderer would convey the design ideas in a user-friendly and time-efficient manner. A balance of time, effort and quality is what I think an in-program feature should provide (I think too much is made of photo-realistic perfection to the nth degree (I'm ok with nth minus x :)), wonderful as it is, at the expense of utility). Much more than that and you're looking at tying up hardware, personnel, etc. I mean, are we really still talking about rendering overnight for our daily needs? That seems inappropriate, unless you're in a league that should really be using a separate (and more efficient) program like 3ds. In fact, use of the phrase "real-time" should be part of the conversation. I'm not saying it would need to be precisely "real-time", but...ah, I think you get the "picture" without me nailing down every shade & nuance (like a photo-realistic image :)). I do want to be able to do iterations while sitting with my clients, much as I can do Revit geometry changes with them.

[narlee]

They did -- or 50% of a loft tool. The swept blend meets 95% of the situations that we run into where the other modeling tools would fail. For other firms I realize that a full loft tool was needed yesterday.

I may be wrong (DOH!) :) about that swept blend.

I googled (Google now being a regular verb) "swept blend" and went to an autodesk-revit.blogspot article showing that helix's and other useful stuff can be made using the swept blend. So...I take it back!!!

Thanks, Wes!

[Wes Macaulay]

No worries, Geoff.

With WU1, I have two Radeon-powered laptops in the office using the Catalyst 8.3 drivers and display performance is slower with OpenGL acceleration turned ON -- except of course for shadowed views. This is fine for plans and sections, but it's murder for elevation views as we usually enable shadows in elevations. :|

These are Mobility Radeons X1400 and X1600 on XP32.

[chuaheyia]

It's actually easier to get a rendering out of Revit with mental ray. We've gone from a few dozen dialog boxes for rendering wit AR down to 3 with mental ray .Speed wise, its about the same for lower quality renderings. It's only when you get into the "best" settings that mental ray takes longer...but the quality is a huge leap forward over AR.

hi, we have some problem with revit architecture's mental ray. we tried to max out the settings an resulted to 19hrs at 20% rendered image and crashed.

settings was custom max everything and output settings to 600DPI -

here's my computer specs
Motherboard:


Intel-based P35 Chipset LGA775-compatible 1333MHz FSB

Dual-channel DDR2 667/800/1066MHz DIMM slots

PCIEx16 and PCIEx1 slots

SATA2 @ ICH9 connections





Processor:



Intel Core 2 Duo LGA775 E6550

2.33Ghz 4MB L2 Cache 1333MHz FSB





RAM:



Kingston 1GB x 3 DDR2 800MHz KVR800D2N5/1G

240-pin DIMM





Operating System:



Windows XP Professional Edition 32-bit Service Pack 2





Storage:



Seagate 160GB SATA HD Drive





PSU:



HEC Winpower 550W





Graphics:



ATI Radeon HD 3870

512MB Graphics Memory 256 bit Memory Interface

DirectX 10.1 support/Shader Model 4.1 support

High-speed 128 bit HDR rendering

ATI CrossfireX Multi-GPU support

55nm Process Technology

Dual DVI Head

[Scott D Davis]

hi, we have some problem with revit architecture's mental ray. we tried to max out the settings an resulted to 19hrs at 20% rendered image and crashed.

settings was custom max everything and output settings to 600DPI -

Don't you think there is a good reason why the "Best" setting that comes out of the box with Revit doesn't even "max" out all the settings? did you try "best" or any of the other settings first to see the results?

There should be no reason to max out all the settings in a Custom render.

[hand471037]

Don't you think there is a good reason why the "Best" setting that comes out of the box with Revit doesn't even "max" out all the settings? did you try "best" or any of the other settings first to see the results?

There should be no reason to max out all the settings in a Custom render.

Honesty you shouldn't need to even use the 'best' setting if your materials and lighting setups are good.

Most of the time you'll be better off using medium settings as a start point, and only upping certain custom sliders if/when needed (and ONLY when you know why you're doing it). Upping the render settings won't solve problems with your lighting and materials, for example.

[samov]

Having an opengl optimized driver (ie: the ati firegl) does help a lot....

I really hate that opengl is so "expensive", and it's not a money issue... good opengl is hard to find. Why do need "special drivers" anyway... I'm hoping they switch to directx. (although problems with stability on the directx part is an issue)


Bottom line: Your viewport performance is only as fast and stable as your display driver.

[narlee]

The wheel is a total mess. How on earth did it get out of R&D? That should have been, not modified, but totally deleted, in the very first Web update. I would pay good money to find out why they kept it past WU1, honestly. Is there something basically wrong with the thinking process going on? What a disaster.

[hand471037]

The wheel is a total mess. How on earth did it get out of R&D? That should have been, not modified, but totally deleted, in the very first Web update. I would pay good money to find out why they kept it past WU1, honestly. Is there something basically wrong with the thinking process going on? What a disaster.

Actually I dig the wheel. My only issue with it is that it's a touch buggy when using a Wacom, and that the Up/Down is really touchy. Well that and the refresh rate, but that's not a fault of the wheel. If you use the steering wheels in other Autodesk applications that have a faster refresh rate they are actually pretty nice.