Large assemblies CATIA VS NX

[Michel1978]

Dear All,

Can anyone explain why Catia can handle large assemblies much better than NX (in our case NX10)?
We are often having problems (slow) with handling large assemblies in NX which are even much smaller than the assemblies of our customer handles in Catia. Assemblies that we deliver to them are already causing problems for us since it is only a tiny part of their complete assembly.
We have once followed a course of NX advanced assemblies, but that didn't help either. There we learned inconvenient tricks like facet bodies and so on.
Or is this just a shortage of NX compared to Catia?

Regards, Michel

Groeten, Michel

I use NX10
HP Z420 Intel Xeon 3.2GHz
Quadro K4000 3GB
64GB Memory
Windows 7, 64-bit

http://www.kvi.nl

A leading Dutch institute in atomic and subatomic physics

 

[petulf]

Yes this is my experience as well, same assembly complexity in Catia V5 and I-deas (Under Virtual Box!) and performance in NX is noticeably poorer (certified workstations and certified drivers for graphics cards). This is not helped by the fact that setting up NX visualization is very complex compared to competitors as there are customer defaults, session settings, and part level settings that interact. Which is why I am open to this not being an NX issue but rather bad settings.
Thus I would very much appreciate if people who have good performance with large assemblies in NX could share their visualization settings related to part templates and customer defaults.

 

[CADPat]

With CATIA, large assemblies are often represented in part, or in whole, with CGR files. Which is something like your "inconvenient tricks like facet bodies", so you might not want to discount that approach too quickly.

Comparing to I-deas, the impact is likely that the data is stored locally in the modelfile and the facets themselves are stored in the MF2, so there is nothing to generate "on the fly". But since it's a 32-bit app, you'll never be able to get "too large" since an individual MF has issues when it approaches 2Gb in size. Whereas NX is 64-bit and can use as much memory as you can provide. The larger the assembly, the bigger the improvement compared to I-deas.

A few suggestions for NX:
- When you open the data, try using Partial Loading and/or Lightweight Facets
- Using Reference Sets can help you control what geometry you see in the Assembly. Some items can benefit from a "simplified" approach.
- You can use the "Save Stored Facets" setting, so that facets do not need to be re-created all the time (like I-deas case)

There are other things you can try, but I'd start with these first and see if they help.

HIH.

Pat

 

[Toost]

I have no experience of Catia at all, so I can't say anything about the comparison.
you say you attended a course of advanced assemblies,
when in time was that ?
The "load lightweight" option has changed how NX works and perform.
Before that one had to load a specific reference set to get the benefits, which wasn't that fun.
Using the "lightweight" mode is kind of automatic, but still betters the performance.
This is without saving facets within the ... file etc.


Regards,
Tomas