X6 rendering time compared to X5

[DavidH]

In X5, it takes 7 seconds on my laptop after I hit "H" to create an Orthographic Full Overview. In X6, opening the same plan, it takes 58 seconds. X6 also seems less responsive in general- there is a slight lag as I use my scroll wheel to zoom in and out. I'm running a Thinkpad T520 with an Intel I7 2.3g processor, and an NVIDIA NVS 4200M card. In edit preferences I changed "hardware edge smoothing" on the render tab in preferences to 0, which helped somewhat, but it's still way slower than X5 and essentially unusable. I can't upgrade the video card b/c it's a laptop. Anyone else had this issue?

David Hornstein
www.light-house-design.com

[jmur]

David, about 4-5 secs. for me with either X5 or 6, HP Pavion i7 2.3g and Nvidia GT630M 1gb.
Jeff

[perryh]

Your computer is on the low side for speed, get a new one as Chief doesn't work well with those internal intel video cards.

[Kilgore Trout]

I am finding that a final view with shadows is much faster in X6 then it was in X5 on my machine. I haven't really done any timing with the previews but they seem to be about the same.

Check your render preferences again. You may have adjusted them for X5 to get the best performance out of your machine and in X6 you have the system defaults. Also, I think X6 is using some newer technology under the hood so that it can run on both the mac and windows. It is possible that this new technology just isn't going to run as fast on your machine.

If all else fails, call tech support.

[Doug Park]

I think X6 ships with fast shadows on. For that older card they will really slow things down. Check you rendering preferences and compare between X6 and X5 to make sure you are making a fair comparison. Different settings will affect the rendering speed by quite a bit.

In addition with each release we add more detail into the model so it is possible that some bits of the model are more accurate resulting in a higher detail that takes a bit longer to render.

The first render after opening a plan will always take longer because it needs to build the 3D. After that only the bits of the 3D that have changed need to be rebuilt so brining up a render view will be faster. This can really confuse your timing if you time one right after a load and the other after having already built the 3D.

[DavidH]

Doug,
No, I made sure that I rendered each view after a fresh program start, so nothing was cached. Also, I have tried X6 with all different render settings but am unable to change speed. However, my NVIDIA card has a variety of settings that are adjustable. Can you suggest settings for the card, based on your knowledge of how CA uses cards to render images?

[Doug Park]

X6 uses frame buffers for rendering. While this technology has been around for a long time some older cards may not implement it well. The NVIDIA NVS 4200 that you list is a very slow card by today's standards and it is likely that X6 has pushed beyond the sweet spot of performance for that card. However, for newer cards the techniques we are using should provide faster performance than the way we were doing things in X5.

I know that isn't the news you are looking for, but it may be time to consider a faster machine. I suspect that even a new $500 machine would outperform your system.

[DavidH]

Doug,
It appears that I can rig up an external video card for my laptop. With this system I could work quickly in my office, and it would only be slow presenting to clients on site, which I could live with. Before I invest in this setup, can you recommend a card or type of card or performance specs for a card that would work best with X6?

[Doug Park]

Performance is not all in the video card. If indeed you can get a faster card for your machine that may speed things up, but then you are probably going to just hit the next bottleneck, possibly processor speed or memory speed.

You can always consult the video card benchmarks to see what might be a good choice.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

How any of these cards will perform in your system is a question for someone more familiar with that hardware than I am. One could probably buy several cards and compare performance in your hardware to find the one that is best, but that seems like a pretty time consuming and expensive exercise.