Revit 2009

[nsinha73]

Why is Revit 2009 Slower/Sluggish then Revit 2008??

You can see significant difference in speed and performance.....Our office is currently refusing to upgrade to 2009 due to this.....

[Scott D Davis]

check out any of the 10000's of topics here that deal with graphic cards and Revit 2009. Did you install the latest build which helped some of these issues?


Install latest build of Revit
Update graphics drivers to latest versions from card manufacturer, not from computer supplier
Try turning open GL on/off to see which performance is better.

[rduffy]

Scott,

This seems to be the quote from Autodesk. If a company like ours has installed and updated every graphic card and memory like staed in the 100000 threads (which we knew prior to the release) Explain how the Beta worked fine but the actual release is causing this problem? What gets me is we have logged this problem and still we get the same responce even after we tell you (Autodesk) we have upgraded everything. When will Autodesk come out and just be fair and tell us what is causing it so that we at least know you all are working it out. As a customer and I bet I speak for alot of people using the product, we understand you are all working hard to make a great product. Not saying anything to us, letting us know that you all are really looking into this matter, makes people upset. I thought Autodesk was strong about listening to the customers and takes it to heart. I bet my salary there will be a new build released.

If a handful of people are having this problem, maybe they did not research before installing. If 100000 people have this problem and they have done the nessecary upgrades, then it is a major problem.

Happy 4th to all the Autodesk people out of the office this week!!!

[iru69]

Explain how the Beta worked fine but the actual release is causing this problem?
I don't believe specifics of the Beta are to be discussed, but what you're suggesting may not be an accurate statement.


check out any of the 10000's of topics here that deal with graphic cards and Revit 2009. Did you install the latest build which helped some of these issues?
Maybe it's time for Autodesk to acknowledge that there are some serious problems and that this is a top priority and they're actually doing everything they can to fix it, and state a goal of when it will be fixed. Weeks, months, years?

[Steve_Stafford]

..Maybe it's time for Autodesk to acknowledge that there are some serious problems and that this is a top priority and they're actually doing everything they can to fix it, and state a goal of when it will be fixed. Weeks, months, years?...Scott Latch has responded in another thread and said that it is a priority and they are taking such reports seriously. When he responded he also said that they are having difficulty reproducing the issue/tracking down the/an issue to fix. Would you prefer he just responds to every such post here instead of working on the problem?

I wish it were as simple to resolve as walking in a room and seeing that the lamp isn't working anymore and replacing its bulb. Apparently it isn't.

[iru69]

I just skimmed through his posts and I'm not seeing what you're referring to... maybe I missed it? But that's kind of beside the point... a post buried in some thread.

I don't see anything about video card performance in the 'RAC2009 Known Issues' document. I don't see anything about video card performance in the 'RAC2009 WU1 List'. I don't see any sticky posts about this issue here on AUGI. I haven't gotten the sense that, "hey, we've got to let people know we're aware of these issues and what we're doing about them before they get overtly frustrated."

The word that comes to mind is "obfuscation". This issue when discussed by Autodesk always seems to be a jumble of "we're not really sure what you're talking about" mixed with "we're looking into it", mixed with "turn off OpenGL". I think a few people have already commented that the general response they got when filing a support request is that "this is news to us". I didn't get the sense that tech support (and resellers) had been notified by the developers that "hey, we've really got a problem here".

How about Autodesk go buy any number of these video cards that are having problems and see for themselves?! It's really not that difficult to see the problem for oneself with a $250 video card.

You would think that if there are "10000's of topics here that deal with graphic cards and Revit 2009", it would indicate that this is a serious problem, and that there would be a little more in the way of official communication from Autodesk about it.

I think that's all my first post was suggesting. I don't think I was suggesting (or have ever suggested) that this was a simple problem to fix.


Scott Latch has responded in another thread and said that it is a priority and they are taking such reports seriously. When he responded he also said that they are having difficulty reproducing the issue/tracking down the/an issue to fix. Would you prefer he just responds to every such post here instead of working on the problem?

I wish it were as simple to resolve as walking in a room and seeing that the lamp isn't working anymore and replacing its bulb. Apparently it isn't.

[Steve_Stafford]

I've apparently blended his replies together with another developer's comments. Scott wrote this earlier:


...I would like to reiterate what Ilya and Tamas have said earlier in this thread. If you are experiencing the slowdowns described in this thread, please contact Autodesk Support.

Support will ask that you provide the project file and a journal of a session when the slowdown occurred. If you can reproduce it, please start a new session of Revit, reproduce the problem, and close Revit. This will create a journal for just this problem and will help narrow it down.

If you are not a Subscription customer, please send me a private message and I will work with you to get your data to Development.

Thanks for you patience while we work to resolve the problem...

I believe it was either Ilya or Tamas that mentioned that they were having difficulty reproducing performance problems.

You are correct that Autodesk could do more to make it more obvious they are aware of or dealing with reported performance issues. They could always do a better job of reaching out to us. Your point about being buried in a thread is too true. They don't have the authority to make a thread sticky so that blame falls to me and other moderators, sorry.

We could do a better job of communicating directly to them too. I wish it were different but reporting things here does not allow them to track and resolve issues effectively. I had lunch with Scott Davis yesterday. I may be speaking out of turn a bit but he shared with me how frustrating it can be for him to see reports here and then when he tries to do some digging on his "side of the fence" he finds no corroboration in support requests or if there are, only a few that too often lack enough data to solve anything. I fully realize that not everyone has the time to submit support requests. It does take time. But to truly resolve the issue they need data.

Side story...my wife worked for a copier company as a dispatcher (yes...she hated it). She was required to ask if the copier was plugged in and on before being permitted to send a tech. She was verbally abused and harrassed repeatedly by various firm's staff for asking such inane and pointless questions, "of course it is plugged in and on, what do you think we are, morons?" In nearly every instance when the dreaded, "the copier is dead" call came in she went through the motions and the tech reported back, "it was unplugged or it was off, the cleaning crew did it again supposedly". Some users don't do good troubleshooting, some don't know how, some can't be bothered. Others do a grand job.

On the tech side of the fence it is unfortunately pretty easy to become complacent, even presumptuous about reports when very often the defining data points to user malaise, old drivers, outdated hardware, couldn't be bothered to learn the feature fully, etc etc. It is also too easy to blame Revit for the issue because nothing changed on my computer, I just installed the new version and now it is worse. Sure looks like it must be Revit, it is a reasonable reaction.

Some members here go above and beyond when submitting info to Autodesk. If you post about a problem I know that you've done your research based on your past posting history. Picking on David Baldacchino...if he posts a question I know that he's been poking at the "sore" for hours and hours and exhausted his options. If a user with 40 posts makes a claim it might not seem quite as convincing, rightly or wrongly...I guess that is a form of profiling? If Aaron Rumple posts we know it can't be trusted :wink:

Let's keep challenging Autodesk to communicate with us better and let's lead by example. If it is tech support requests they need, inundate them. If it is data they need...bring it on... They will either find it and resolve it faster or some of you will be correct, they'll continue to obfuscate and frustrate users and undermine their own intentions.

The past should indicate their willingness to resolve issues they can track down, the area calculation issue...the y2k8 date issue... and more going further back. This community helped make them aware of each of those two issues I just mentioned. So we do have some power or voice, they just need the formal support request process so they can keep track of these things better. As searching these these forums can easily prove, regrettably even with the improved search capablities and opening up the forums to the google indexing "bots" it can be hard to find that post we vaguely remember reading about last week...last month...last year.

[trombe]

But to truly resolve the issue they need data.

Let's keep challenging Autodesk to communicate with us better and let's lead by example. If it is tech support requests they need, inundate them. If it is data they need...bring it on... They will either find it and resolve it faster or some of you will be correct, they'll continue to obfuscate and frustrate users and undermine their own intentions. .

In an unusual move and despite the fact that I am having all of the problems at different times that have all been noted on the forum (out of video memory, error re-drawing window, freeze, crash, close, re-open, program terminates unexpectedly, progress save hangs,...i have filed a support request and got the expected replies for 3Gb switch, VM and video drivers, and the WI-1 service patch / build (all of which I have updated as well as the journal files and project file), I have to say that AutoDesk, have been very good at communication with me and patient and I can say that I did not expect to even get a reply from my query.

Like anyone who is experiencing these problems with RA09, I am disappointed because otherwise it is such a fantastic release and there are so many excellent features.
Still, I could not imagine how hard it would be for a group of people, expert in their fields, to figure out why after so many strong and mainly reliable builds for so many years, this version has so many problems in a small but apparently consistent range , and when the number of user computer configuration must be in the hundreds of different types.
It must be a nightmare for them right now.
At least I can restart Revit and it is working much better with the Nvidia Quadro 175.51 driver, even if things are still not right.
I think I have to agree with Steve Stafford and vote for patience and diligence for a while.

cheers
trombe

[Steve_Stafford]

Nvidia has reported that they expect to have a serious problem in their second quarter of business to due chip quality issues. This article at Barron's (http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily) Tech Trader Daily (http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2008/07/03/nvidia-shares-bashed-on-q2-warning-now-a-bargain/) provides a little insight. Add this to the equation, ouch! Here's the text from the article I'm referring to:


...
July 2, 2008, 8:38 pm
Nvidia Cuts Q2 Guidance; Suffers Chip Glitch

Posted by Eric Savitz
Nvidia (NVDA) (http://online.barrons.com/quotes/main.html?symbol=nvda) shares have been clobbered in late trading after the company this afternoon warned (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080702/aqw114.html?.v=46) that revenue and gross margin for its fiscal second quarter ending July 27 would be lower than previously forecast. The company now sees revenue for the quarter of $875 million to $950 million; the company had previously forecast (http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2008/05/08/nvda-sees-q2-revs-dn-5-vs-q1-margins-an-issue/) that revenue would be down 5% sequentially from the April quarter, or about $1.09 billion. The company previously said it expected gross margin to be up about 100 basis points from the April quarter. Nvidia said the shortfall is due to end-market weakness around the world, the delayed ramp of a next generation media and communications processor, and price adjustments to its graphics processors to respond to competitive pressures.
The company also said it will take a one-time charge of $150 million to $200 million to cover “anticipated warranty, repair, return, replacement and other costs and expenses,” from a weak die/packaging material in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products used in notebook systems. “Certain notebook configurations with GPUs and MCPs manufactured with a certain die/packaging material set are failing in the field at higher than normal rates.” the company said in a statement. “To date, abnormal failure rates with systems other than certain notebook systems have not been seen.” NVIDIA said it has begun talks with its supply chain regarding this issue and will also seek to access insurance coverage for this issue.
In after hours trading, NVDA is down $3.95, or 21.9%, to $14.08.

[dbaldacchino]

Troubleshooting hardware can be extremely frustrating. We're dealing with electronics, which are notoriously freaky. Everything works great on one huge project, and a smaller project regenerates slower on the same machine (just experienced this issue this week). So I can understand how Support can find it very hard to reproduce what we report, even if we report with all the necessary info. The fact that we're not within the same network environment throws a huge wrench into this process.

It costs a lot of money to troubleshoot. One side collects the data and reports the issue, the other side analyzes the data, tries to reproduce, researches the database, offers solutions and/or asks for more info. All this takes time, and time is money. I think if I were Autodesk and I notoriously had problems with troubleshooting serious hardware issues, I'd come up with a scheme where I would pay to ship the customer's hardware to my lab so I can test the exact configuration, and work up some sort of hardware lease until I'm ready to ship the customer's hardware back. I know this will never happen, but I see it as the only viable option if the issue is difficulty with reproducing these hardware problems back at the lab. Alternatively, some way of taking control of the customer's machine remotely so I can SEE what is going on and check issues directly. It should result in more reliability and less time going back and fort mining for data from your customer.

On our side, we have a lot of technology at our disposal to produce more solid reports. Use video clips as much as possible to clearly show Support the problems you're having. Typed text doesn't do such a great job. And most importantly, watch your attitude. It's easy to turn ugly. I do it myself from time to time and it takes effort to realize that it's not going to lead to a solution.