civil3d 2011 still slow even when running on workstation pc

[asilis]

Hello everyone,
I am abit puzzled about what's going on and Civil 3D 2011 is still so slow on a
Core i7 930 cpu (thats 8 bloody cores! I guess thats 4 cores x2 due to hyperthreading??)
with 6GB or RAM
and Nvidia Quadro FX 1800
and even with an 80GB SSD....

OK I am working on a Tin surface here - about 3km of road. This is just the surface here no extra layer. so its just triangles, contours, points.
when i extract ALL the objects (about 250k of them - yes that's alot) it takes ages to complete each operation.

In fact, the operation: extract from surface -> select all objects BUT the surface -> copy them -> create new file -> paste to original location

took enough time, for me to find this website, register, and write this post..!!!!

Whats puzzling me, is that while checking the resource monitor in windows 7, I was astonished to see that the whole command is run by just one of the 8 cores. only one would look as if its carrying out some intensive operation.. and the acad.exe process would only show total cpu usage of 12%..

Additionally the GPU seems only to be used when I run the commands like '3d orbit' - at least then the image rotation is smooth.

however, i didn't do that here, and the gpu , along with 7/8 cores seem to just be lazy...
and i don't want that.

(note: I should also mention that the memory used in total by the system is no more than 4GB so it's not like the RAM is slowing down the processing)

so there is one of three things to conclude here:

1) either i am missing a driver or smth that will let civil 3d utilize all cores (and perhaps the gpu too since Quadro cards can be beasts of parallel calculations)

2) Civil 3d as an application fails to incorporate multi-core CPU and GPU programming to allow it to run faster. That would be most upsetting since you get to pay such large sum of money to use this application

3) impose restrictions in my project to get the job done, like reduce the area of the surface or the density of the objects etc. Also not a great idea since I paid the extra money to get a workstation level computer in order to EXACTLY avoid doing that...

If however the problem can be fix, could you give me any pointers??
Thank you very much vfor your help
Thanassis Silis

[rkmcswain]

#2, your statement is true (and not a secret BTW...)

http://support.autodesk.com/getDoc.asp?id=TS15224826

This is almost a year old, but still applies for the most part IMO....
http://www.civil3d.com/2009/11/new-c...th-peter-funk/

[Richard McDonald]

The order and way you perform tasks in C3D can have a massive effect of the speed and stability of the scheme you are working on. More help on this will be found in the C£D forum. I was doing 3-5 Km schemes on a far inferior machine it was slow but not painfully so, split each element down to its own drawing and then combine for the final design.

[asilis]

So that's it?
Autodesk claims its predominantly single threaded application and thats it?
Has there been no move towards the multicore market?
no intention whatsoever?

[rkmcswain]

So that's it?
Autodesk claims its predominantly single threaded application and thats it?
Has there been no move towards the multicore market?
no intention whatsoever?

Nobody here can answer those questions, other than to say 'we don't know'.
Autodesk does not discuss future plans, so I doubt you could get an answer from them either, although you could try.
I'm pretty certain that it has been on the wish list in the past too.

[asilis]

hmmm it's been on the wishlist since 2007...
and multi core CPU have been available to the consumer market for the past 5years ..

This should really have been regulated by now...
I must admit I am most disappointed...

[rkmcswain]

I must admit I am most disappointed...

These forums are 99% peer-to-peer, tell Autodesk so they will know how you feel

[dgorsman]

hmmm it's been on the wishlist since 2007...
and multi core CPU have been available to the consumer market for the past 5years ..

This should really have been regulated by now...
I must admit I am most disappointed...

"Multi-threading" isn't a magical wand to solve every speed issue. In a number of things, it would actually slow down the process. And converting an existing, single-threaded program to run across multiple threads is *not* a trivial matter. Its difficult enough getting it right when the program is designed around multi-threading from scratch. If they ever do a complete rebuild of Civil3D, that would be the most opportune time to incorporate this feature.

Best thing you can do for now, is throw in another 6GB of RAM. Don't count on that SSD for being faster than a conventional drive for write-operations. If you are working on a network located file it won't matter much either.