Revit 2008 compared with 2009

[nsinha73]

I would like some "Pros and Cons" in upgrading to 2009
We are in subscription and have been in RA2008 for some time and have RA2009 sitting by our workstations for months.
Right now we have a shared file (Central) we all are working on and if we upgrade to RA2009, what could be the consequences?
I heard RA2009 is a lot sluggish then RA2008 ( I could be wrong here, no offense). I have tried updating my graphic drivers and played with bunch of stuff......RA2009 is still sluggish and flickers when I "Pan" my dwgs....OpenGL Turned on and off.
I don't want to sacrifice my RA2008 performance for new features.....

But.....is it worth?

Thanks Guys

[Mike Sealander]

Hi.
I think the floor and roof editing tools are well worth the upgrade. The big seller for us might be the fbx export to Max Design. This is a tremendously easy way to render and do lighting analysis. We haven't experienced the sluggishness, which I think may be partly cause to room volume calculation settings and shadows on.
The dimension text editing feature, while controversial to some, is also a big help.

[DaveP]

We upgraded something in the neighborhood or 40 projects, and had no significant issues.
We have OpenGL off.

[twiceroadsfool]

Upgraded our jobs and love it. Its not any more sluggish for us than 2008 is/was.

Linked views other than plans are monumental for large projects, MR is way nicer for inclusive rendering...

[dgreen.49364]

We have upgrade several projects of several different sizes. We did see a slow down in speed between 2008 and 2009. It was noticeable. We had upgraded all our drivers. After several weeks of this we installed more RAM and enabled the 3GB switch and things got better.

[Brandon_Pike]

We saw a slow down as well, so we added some more ram (going from 1gb to 4gb) and it's now faster than I have ever worked in Revit on any previous release.

[AJGKennedy]

I have been begging for the upgrade… I have to admit I have only one job in Revit at the moment so it would not be a big deal… and I think our company only have a small number in total… mine being the largest and most complete…

We are on subscription also, but there has been hesitation in moving forward from some… I have tested 2009 out and have made a copy of my project and run it both in 2009 & 2008… many little problems that I have faced in 2008 have been fixed within 2009… this is one reason I wish to jump… and yes lots of nice features…

I have found myself frustrated many times with different issues only to find out that they have either been taken care of by updates or the release of 2009… so I am a all for the jump person… but I am not there yet… only in the testing phase… I have played with it lots… (running it on a laptop so I can take it home and do mock projects and ideas and test different scenarios to see how it reacts…

There is movement in our company that they are thinking on the move, but it will possibly come with new hardware, which is good, because if you didn’t hear it from a couple other post… RAM, RAM, RAM…. And Power… that will do the trick…
Best of luck… glad you asked the question… I am glad to see these other post from those who have been using it more fully…

[Wes Macaulay]

We have Revit 2009 in use on all our projects now, and made the jump fairly soon because we wanted the new rendering capabilities.

We always have used OpenGL acceleration, and with the exception of one machine using an older FireGL V3100 card, OpenGL has been great for us. That said, video display performance in 2009 is about half what it used to be in 2008, so regens are slower, panning is slower, moving in 3D is slower. It's not a deal-killer, but when you go back to 2008, you'd be amazed at how the zippy the display seems. I am hoping to see this fixed in the next release of 2009.

We miss Accurender procedural trees in some ways; you could put the camera under the branches and have the leaves frame the rendering -- that was nice. But the new renderer does so much more justice to a building that there is no going back to 2008. Plus there are a slew of other additions and improvements that make 2009 a must in terms of upgrading.

[Brandon_Pike]

Wes,

How much RAM are you running on your machines? We were working on a 200,000 sf retail store in 2008 and it was running at a manageable speed. We then upgraded to 2009 and things slowed down to a crawl. We saw that the min system requirements for 2009 were 1gb of ram (which we were running) but the recommended was 4gb. We put 3 more gigs into every machine and 2009 is now running (regens, panning, switching views, etc) faster than before the upgrade.

I'm wondering if graphics cards need upgrades as well.

[Wes Macaulay]

Well, I don't know why upgrading to 2009 would create that much of a slowdown -- that doesn't make sense...

We went 4Gb RAM from 2 because our projects were just getting bigger all the time ;-)

But it didn't change our speeds (other than saving, which didn't so much go faster as just actually work and not crash!)

What sort of graphic cards do you have? It's unlikely that upgrading them will help much.

[cdatechguy]

We upgraded our vid cards to 512mb and Ram to 4gb to max out 3.5gb (XP Pro 32bit)....well, some of us anyway. Once I turned off OpenGL it seemed to work the same as if I was in 2008.

One of our reasons to switch, dare I say it, is the ability to change dimensions...
But I like the ability to change the surface fills for materials and the ability to "tag all not tagged" as well as the phase controls...

Oh, and Worksharing Monitor works in 2009.

[Brandon_Pike]

Hmmm... interesting... on my machine I'm running and Nvidia Quadro4 380 XGL although I'm bot sure of the vid card memory