Computer Questions

[MikeM]

Hi all!

Just wondering about computer specs. My computer runs pretty sluggish on larger designs, mostly with the visual rendering.
Turning off the majority of the layers does help quite a bit, but curious...does Irricad benefit much from Workstation graphic
cards? I cannot seem to find much info on VisualCADD sites/forums, It seems to be all about Autocad which apparently does
not seem to benefit hugely on using workstation GPU's at least in 2D. So does VisualCadd follow that same principle or would it
benefit greatly to bump up to a Quadro or Firepro for larger designs?

Also while on the subject, is Hyperthreading a worthwhile production boost for Irricad?

My Specs:
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
Intel i5-2500k @ 3.3
16gig Ram
ATI Radeon HD 6850 (I assume the weak link)
Irricad on SSD



Thanks Much!

Mike

[Dan Crosby]

Hi Mike,

Your machine is almost certainly more than adequate. The slowness of large designs we think is more likely to be related to a legacy memory management issue within Visual CADD. The VCADD team know about this and we are hopeful they will be able to improve things soon - but we don't have a definite ETA on that as yet. In short, improving your hardware will help of course, but it might be a marginal improvement. At present mitigating slow-down by turning off layers is probably the best approach.

Regards,

Dan

[jovivier]

Hi Mike,

Further details may help in diagnosing the cause:-
- which version are you currently running?
- what do you mean by 'slow'?
- what do you mean by 'large' designs?

[MikeM]

Dan and Jo -

Thanks for the quick response!


I found the culprit on my latest design that was bogging my computer down.
The design was actually done by another designer whom has since retired,
I am just going into it to revise some. Anyways It ended up being tens of
thousands of very tiny points scattered throughout the design. Moved them
to a new layer and all is well now!

I should have caught it before, but I figured it made a good excuse to also ask of
the hyperthreading/GPU setups, as I have often wondered if they provided much
of a boost to productivity for Irricad. But seeing it would likely only be a minor
improvement for what I would consider a rather expensive upgrade probably not
a worthwhile return on costs! I imagine an upgrade to 12 would be a much wiser choice!

Jo to answer your questions
I am running 11.12
The above mentioned design was taking about 5-8 times as long to complete any process,
print, change views etc. But again for the most part resolved with layers once I found the issue.
Size-wise about 40,000 sprinklers / 250 acres / 45 valves

Thank you both for your help!

Mike