sw2003 Performance 1

[Mindnumb]

Today I installed SW2003 sp0.

Its quite a bit slower than sw2001plus.

I have not run any benchmarks on it, but the graphic is notisably slower.

It improved a bit when I checked the software accelerated opengl checkbox, opende an assembly, closed it, and unchecked the box, but 2001plus is still much faster.

My config is as follows:

win2000 prof
athlon 1200
768 sdram
2x30Gb ide raid0 on dedicated card
Asus Geforce2 gts 32 mb ram, with quadro hack.

Virus checking is disabled at the moment.

 

[rlee1]

FYI - our problem is the Spaceball. The spaceball people are aware of the problem and say they are working on it.

 

[JNR]

Just to add more fuel..... er, I mean information. We have not yet loaded SW2003 (it's a SmarTeam thing - we are still on SW2001+ until next week or so). However I am running it at home with no speed issues or other problems on XP Pro. (constantly updated). I only have one real bitch so far - they took away the system option to open design tables in a separate window. I can't have people picking that selection on the fly, due to some of the tools we have built here.

However..... (and remember we are still on SW2001+) At work we are just installing new hardware and moving from Win2000 to XP. We selected the fire GL2 because someone saw it recommended on the SW site. Unfortunately they did not look at the date!!! We have all manner of crash problems. The speed went to molasses until we played with driver versions and XP SP's. (It is now fast enough... on some systems.... between crashes!). After much investigation on manufacturer websites, in our IT dept., by experimentation and a Quado 4 750 loaner, plus help from our VAR (yes, they are very supportive) we have isolated it to the GL2 graphics card, not SolidWorks. (I do have a SpaceBall at home, so I could bring it in and test that out also.) As to the Gforce problem, as I recall it is a "unified back-buffer" issue or somesuch technospeak. It seems to be related to XP also. NOTE: Nvidia has NO INTENTIONS OF FIXING IT, but you can maybe use an old driver version which has an option to handle that. Believe it or not when my system crashed, XP sent me right to the page on their website!!! (So much for Microsoft bashing...) I guess they want you to move up to the next new product - that's marketing.... gotta learn to live with it or try another brand (and probably get bitten next year instead).

Interesting to note that even though our new systems are identical in all respects (and built in house) they exhibit different frequency and types of crashes - not just in SolidWorks.

BTW: This whole discussion shows up old CAD industry catch 22 (I've been around the industry on all sides - fully 3D - since 1979). Blame the CAD vendor!!!! Well, I say if you make a graphics board that supposedly supports a standard, better make sure it does. You can't blame the software manufacturer for using an extra feature of the standard in a new release (Ie. trying to give you those improvements you keep yelling for.) You can blame the board manufacturer for claiming compatibility with software and not keeping the information up to date - or showing non-sense in their chart (eg. compatible with one rev of SW but not the next SP when it did not alter the graphics interface?). You can't expect the software vendor to be able to undertake exhaustive testing of every hardware and OS combination out there. That is an impossible task and unbelievably expensive, time consuming and imperfect. Further more it's a symptom of a bigger problem. We all want enhancements for all sorts of stuff, then later turn round and complain it's too complicated or or too slow or "they" don't support "my" hardware anymore. Sometimes you have to understand that to move forward you have to leave something behind. Understand that you are in a constant hardware upgrade path if you are using ANY capable CAD software today. And you are going to find incompatibilities at times. I hear the same types of issues from UG, CATIA, Pro E, AutoDuck, Solid Edge, etc. users. Of course, a "Pro-E weenie" would probably not knowingly admit it to a "SoldWorks weenie" - we are all so damned protective of "our software" choice. We all need to grow up, quit whining and be realistic (and I do mean "WE" - me included). We need to have some patience and do some thorough, scientific testing before blaming any source for the problems. Don't just assume it's SolidWorks 2003 fault or Prisoner of Zelda version 5 million, or Pro-E rev 57.a.96.z, or Microsoft XP SP0 , or Photoshop 23 or whatever. Things are getting so much more sophisticated so quickly these days it's sometimes a wonder anything works together.

OK, I promise to stay off my soapbox now. I'm just appealing for us to sit back, put our emotions to one side and calmly debug the situation without preconceived ideas. Then maybe we can find the real root cause of the problems and help each-other and our vendors to figure it out.

One more suggestion for ANY major upgrade - software or hardware. Do what we do - wait a while for the first set of obvious bugs to be dealt with, then test it out (really beat it up) out of the production environment before you commit to it.

PS: My apologies to AutoDesk - it's a personal thing....

 

[Mindnumb]

Love your input JNR !

I have just installed solidworks 2003 at home, and it flies!
my system is an athlon xp processor @ 2 GHz, NForce 2 motherboard, GeForce2 mx card, and 512 ram. Winxp pro. No anti virus instsalled at time of sw installation.
My work pc has a bit slower prosessor ( athlon 1200 ), but moer ram, an a full fledged Geforce2 GTs card and win2000. After the last installation of sw2003, its a bit better, but nowhere neare the performance of my home machine, or 2001+

I downloaded the 2001 benchmark program ( swx benchmark v1.2) and run only the short graphics part. at home I get 26 seconds to complete, at work I get 42)

I t should be notet that the graphics cards have the infamous Quadro hack, wich allows them to use the quadro drivers, in fact making them quadro cards.

The unified back depth buffer was enabled on the drivers shipped with the asus GTs card, but was disabled on later drivers, hence the quadro hack to get the benfit of the newer drivers as well. I recomend it to any one loocking for a high Performance/price ratio.

Well.. I run the same drivers at home and work, and the difference in performance is enourmous. The front side bus and the processor speed is alot better on my home machine, (200 fsb = 400 ddr memory speed) and the operating system of course, might be the root of the problem.

Have anyone any benchmarks to contribute with? could be interesting to see what kind of systems are perfect for the software.

Heres a link to the benchmark site, If you deside to run it, remember that it was made for 2001+, and when run on 2003 you ned to convert the files it uses (loads of nice models and parts included ) run the short version only. the long one tkes an eternity, at least on my machine...

http://www.specbench.org/gpc/apc.static/sw2001plus.html

lets see if something interesting comes from this !!!

 

[JNR]

More News:

Thanks for the feedback, Mindnumb, I was hoping my comments would be taken in the spirit they were intended and no-one would go getting all huffy-n-grumpy.

For reference, my home system is just an Intel 1.4 GHz with 3/4 Gig memory and a TNT graphics card!!! (they must pay some of you guys way too much ;-) ) and it flies on 2003 at least as fast as it did on 2001+.

Meanwhile back at work..... Further investigation is showing interesting things. Note we are still on 2001+.

The Quadro card has been tried in several apparently identical new systems. We have now eliminated any purely graphical problems in SolidWorks - we did not have the correct driver version. The latest on PNY.com is Version 31, but if you go to Nvidia, then to the Quadro product line FIRST, then to the driver downloads, you get a list of Partener Certified drivers for all manner of software complete with offical logos!.. even CATIA!! Obviously pick the SolidWorks one and it is version 28.something or thereabouts (currently). My memory is not that good - too busy - Hey, you are all big boys and girls, you can find it.

Now we are still seeing crashes and there is no difference in this respect between the Quado and Fire GL2. However we have definitely isolated it to specific circumstances. It is NOT RELATED TO SOLIDWORKS. It is related to a combination of XP, network access and new window operations (mostly on an open or close). It happens with relative frequency in Lotus Notes (5 times yesterday on one system). It does happen in SolidWorks, but only when SmartTeam (our PDM system) is accessing the network in combination with a new window operation. It often completes the operation but XP goes instantly to 640/480 resolution and either crashes or reports recovery from a device failure and requests a reboot. I even got it yesterday when I was downloading one of the drivers from the internet. Most of the time solidWorks is not even open, though the more windows you have open (not necessarily active) the more frequent is seems to be. Somewhere I recall seeing comment about turing off some XP features like cursor shadows, etc. The guy who has the test Quadro right now went into System Properties and turned off all those check boxes ("soft font edges", etc., etc.) (Control panel - System Props - Advanced, I think.) It now looks like Win2000, but so far it has been stable. This does not offend me any - I always thought the standard XP interface was too cartoonish anyway - gimme them square corners!!! I am going to try the same thing with my system running the Fire GL2. If this solves the problem I'll let y'all know.

Regards,
JNR

P.S. Hands up everyone who hates Lotus #%$*&^ Notes

\o/
|
/ \ Its another personal thing...... If ya goin' to write something for the Windows environment, swallow ya pride and use the standard interface code they provide fer cryin' out loud. Be consistent. Oh yeah,.... and make sure it all actually works!!!

 

[Rocko]

I still believe that a network related issue working in the background is also a possible cause of the some performance issues. I have noticed that when the network has a hiccup that the system with windows xp will show cpu usage shootup which results in some irregularities in SolidWorks. I do not know for a fact but it would be interesting how many people with problems are on what type of network software, peer to peer, novell ect... its just a thought.

 

[Mindnumb]

Greetings Good Men.

JNR.: This is only suggestions, I am no expert on these things. You probably are aware of the things I am about to mention regarding video cards, but all the same, here we go.
(hope no one notises my lack of knowlege on these things )

I am not competely convinced it is not an SW issue.

The reason you do not see much defference in speed might be the fact that you run a older video card. The Geforce series, and most newer cards, use "hardware transform and lightning" and it takes a load of work off the cpu as it generates the geometry displayed, not only shading the finished geometry.

Your tnt card does not have this function, so if the difference I am seeing is related to wether the geometry is generated by the card or the cpu, people runung in software mode, or with older cards like yours will not see the same issues.

I tried putting the software acceleration on both 2001+ and 2003, and the differense was not there longer. Both were equally slow
I am leaning towards the explanatoin that there might be som issues with the OpenGL instruction sets on some SW installations. A coworker of mine had the prerelease of 2003 installed earlier on, and it ran very good on his machine. (same specs as mine) I do not remember if he upgraded or fresh installed the official release, but the result was syrup and molasses. At sub zero.

It might of course be some other issues causing SW to figt for the same resources as Windows, but I think it still is related to SW as I se the problems on both win2000 an xp mentioned in this thread. As for the network related crashes We had it for a whole week here at work, and it turned out to be related to some new aouto update virus patch for norman virus controll. (or norton? do not remember)I do not remember if this was server or client side problem. If you are having chrashes opening things in solidworks from network locations, try copying it locally, and opening it. If this works, you probably have the same problems.

Just post if you can´t find the soulution, I can ask my system admin for the fix.

Well.. back to the strictly perfomance related issues. Are the people with problems all running cards with hardware T&F (transform and lightening) ? remember to post your hardware and software configs, as it might be closely related ti the issue. (might not, lets not close other paths to salvation...)

 

[tluxon]

JNR,

Just a thought -

If your motherboards have an Intel chipset, make sure the Intel drivers are installed, not the Windows drivers (the OS will install Win drivers and make everything "appear" okay). The kind of problems you describe point to something very fundamental and I've had this happen on one of my machines.

All the best,

Tim

 

[Mindnumb]

Thanks for the input tluxon !

I am fortunate enough to have a via chipset on my work computer. (via 133kt , I believe.) Via chipset drivers are up to date


To day I installed the SW 2.1 patch. Performance was superb ! At least on SW 2001+ level. Only problem, when I opened a sketch an started drawing a line, everything went to a staggering halt. system did not crash, an it completed the operation, but every screen update came in something like 45 sec ! My coworker experienced the exact same thing.

The soulution was to go back from the 41.09 drivers of Nvidia to the 30.82 ones. Sketch now vorks okay (allthough screen updates are slow as before the patch.) Subjectively, the performance seems a little better from before the patch, but nowhere near wath I saw with the 41.09 drivers from nvidia (exept for the little sketch problem %%&#¤%"#"#¤) PS: these drivers are quadro hacked.

Allright then, just have to figure out why I cant have both good sketch and shaded performance at the same time