Inventor 2011 vs Solidworks 2012 Assembly Speed

[curvyrace]

Two years ago, I posted a comment regarding how much better I thought Solidworks is over Inventor. That comment stirred up quite a few responses, as you can imagine. Two yars later, I am now fully convinced that Solidworks is the better package and I've finally convinced the owner of my company to consider switching. Before cutting the check though, I wanted to perform some head to head tests of the two packages. One of these tests revealed a huge performance difference between the two packages and I was wondering if anyone else has seen similar results.

I took an assembly of approximately 240 pcs that had all been created in Inventor. The assembly had about 100 iParts and other solids in it, that were, again, all created in Inventor. I launched Inventor 2012 and had it open this assembly. It took Inventor 4m51sec to open the file and be ready for editing.

I then opened Solidworks and asked it to open that same Inventor .iam assembly file and walked away. The next morning, I found that Solidworks had opened the assembly and created Solidworks copies of each component in the assembly. I then saved the newly created sldasm file and closed Solidworks. Finally, I launched Solidworks and asked it to open the sldasm file. Solidworks had the file open and ready to edit in 9 sec!

Has anyone else seen this same level of performance difference or was there a flaw in my testing procedure? I performed this same test using a smaller assembly and a single part, with similar results.

Cheers!

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

After opening the IV assy in SW, were the parts fully & correctly mated, or just fixed in place?
Were the parts fully featured when opened in SW?
Did all the features have fully constrained, dimensioned and editable sketches?

 

[curvyrace]

SW feature recognition was allowed to run on each part in the assembly during the initial conversion process and the parts I checked had the features recognized successfully.

I didn't think to check constraints, so I would have to assume those did not get through the conversion process.

Do you think having no constraints would account for this large of a speed difference?

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Having no constraints (mates) or associative parts would certainly account for some of the performance boost, but I have no idea how much without experimenting.

To have a truly comparative test, the parts and assys should be re-created from scratch with SW.

I would be extremely surprised if SW was truly THAT much faster than IV.

 

[mflayler]

I agree, that is a weighted test. The same would happen in reverse for Inventor.

I hope you don't get burned by the V6 transistion that SW will be going through, will be tough to lose all that modeling data when it turns into Catia light. Remember, SolidWorks is not the future of Dassault Systemes and it will never be as good as Catia whereas Inventor is the flagship product. You may see small differencese today but that gap will just continue to win out in Autodesk's favor. Especially with the Autodesk new aquisition of tSplines (big set back for Dassault).

I also notice you are comparing a year old Inventor 2011 vs. the new SolidWorks. With the 2012 product line you get a whole Suite of products that Dassault cannot stand up to. Maybe you could dig up your old post again since a lot has changed in two years.

 

[rollupswx]

It is interesting how out-of-date this thread is already

http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=243567

guess this stuff is a moving target that deserves ongoing professional development.