What is your impression of AutoCAD 2007 3D performance?

[Steve Johnson]

What is your impression of AutoCAD 2007's 3D performance when compared with your earlier release? Please exclude general performance, which is covered in this poll. I'm thinking of the sort of 3D operations you do regularly, when using the sort of drawings you usually work on.

[noozybkk]

Steve,

I spent quite a bit of time last night racing various machines against each other using both 2007 and 2006.

Here's the specs on the machines I've tried so far...

1. Pentium 4, 2.8GHz, 768MB DDR 300, nVidia MX 400 64MB

2. Pentium 4, 3.0GHz, 512 MB DDR 400, nVidia GeForce 6200 Turbo Cache 128MB

3. AMD Athlon 64x2, 2GB DDR 400, Matrox Parhelia 128MB

4. Pentium 4, 2.8GHz, 1MB DDR 333, ATI Mobility Radeon 9000

Using the same 3d model for all cases I found that with no visual styles applied, there wasn't much to differentiate between 2006 and 2007 when just drafting and manipulating solids.

Working with 3d Orbit in 2007, perspective projection and either Conceptual or Realistic styles applied was almost impossible. The display refresh very shaky and staggered on all machines. Whereas using 3d Orbit, perspective projection and Gouroud shading in 2006 was very smooth on all, except the laptop (#4 above).

The fastest of all 4 machines working in 3d with applied Visual Styles on 2007 was #2 above.

I must admit I am very disappointed with the Matrox graphics card. I downloaded the latest drivers last night and it ran like a three-legged donkey - even just in a model space 2d drawing with dynamic input swithced on. Switching off dynamic input helped a lot. I rolled back the drivers to the ones that came bundled with the card (a year old) and it all ran fine again.

I think I am going to save up for a Quadro or FireGL card for the AMD machine. Unfortunately it's on an ASUS A8V motherboard so I am limited to AGP8X graphics bus...unless I save up for a new morherboard also

[Steve Johnson]

Not many people using 2007 for 3D yet, it seems?

[jdille33877]

I have a project where I have to make wire grills in 3d.

When I saw the new "sweep" command I thought I had it made.

I have been making the grills using cylinder and torus and then slicing the torus to trim it.

This method creates a fill of about 12 meg.

I used the sweep to make the same grill and the fill is about 80 meg!

Needless to say this is NOT acceptable!

I hope they fix it or show me what I am doing wrong.

[johnw]

I had high hopes for AutoCAD 3d! So far, by what I've seen, it is too slow to be usable. I was hoping it would be as good as sketchup with fewer file translation problems and better lighting, materials, rendering, etc. Nobody in my office is convinced! We will stick with Sketchup...

[Steve Johnson]

Steve,
I must admit I am very disappointed with the Matrox graphics card. I downloaded the latest drivers last night and it ran like a three-legged donkey - even just in a model space 2d drawing with dynamic input swithced on. Switching off dynamic input helped a lot. I rolled back the drivers to the ones that came bundled with the card (a year old) and it all ran fine again.

That is probably because unless the card and driver combination exactly matches an approved pair in the Autodesk database, the hardware acceleration is turned off by default. What if you use the latest drivers, enter the 3DCONFIG command and go and turn on the go-faster stuff again?

[Doodlemusmaximus]

We've just got the upgrade from head office for 2007 (we're a little behind the times in this backwater), but judgeing from these responsis I think we'll wait a little while before upgradeing to it for the time being. Cheers guys its been a help

[jtonks]

We have just recently upgraded all our CAD stations to 3.3 Ghz machines with 2GB RAM. Due to our IT dept getting an incompatible graphics card, we have been using a couple of the machines with just the motherboard graphics. Pretty disillusioned at this point but still hopeful the proper graphics card would help.

Today we installed the new cards (an Autodesk certified one) and opened up the sample 3D House drawing. Purely subjectively, did not look any different in terms of pan, zoom, orbit etc of the rendered house.

This prompted me to open up a Mech Desktop 6 (2002) on my old machine (1.6 GHz, 256 mB RAM,Matrox card). Test involved pan,zoom, orbit etc. Result was a little bit jerky but quite usable.

Same file opened in MDT 2007 on new machine resulted in pans where you move the cursor then wait 5 seconds for something to happen.

Must say that I am very disillusioned and if it was not for file compatibility issues, I would stick with 2002!!

Regards from

Tasmania, Australia

John

[sgryd]

I have a Matrox P650, but I bought it for accurate colors and good support for monitor calibration. I woudn't by a Matrox for 3D. I don't even think the top of the line Parhelia has good 3d support. Matrox make great colors but not so great 3d (in my knowledge).

Acad 2007 is slow in 3d with my Matrox card. I'm hoping that 3d will get a boost when my nVidia FX500 arrives next week. This is among the cheepest of the good 3d cards from nVidia, but it is fully supported by Acad2007 according to AutoDesk. if i had PCIexpress instead of AGP8x I would have bought nVidia FX540 instead.

AGP-cards seems to be rare these days. I made alot of phone calls before I found someone who could sell me an FX500 card.

/Michael