TheKitchenAbode

Seems like they are trying to offset the processor cost by using other less costly components. It may not be important but I would certainly check into some of the other hardware specs to see if this is the case. A well balanced system is usually the most satisfying over the long haul. Graham

Dennis, looks to me like the room is being flooded with way to much light. The red cast is the result of light stricking the furniture and reflecting back onto other surfaces. You can see from the high intensity spot on the ceiling above the floor lamp that it is way to high in intensity. Also the exterior light coming in through the windows appears to be too intense, where the light strikes the floor the details are completely lost, it's just a bright white patch. Graham

My first system for Chief had a Quadro card, everything seemed to function just fine. I think the main difference is that these cards are targeted towards the professional engineering community and as such command a higher price. Most of us are using consumer grade gamming cards that provide a better price/performance balance. Also as the consumer card market is so competitive these cards are upgraded much faster with new features such as improved support for higher resolution monitors. If not sure which route to go then it would be best to check out the specs of these cards in conjunction with your software to see if there is any distinct advantage of one over the other. Graham

Thanks Scott, will definitely do this. Not sure why they would remove models unless it has something to do with the manufacturer. The more models the better, maybe they could make an arrangement to convert these to generic models instead of removing them completely. Graham

Noticed that one and also the Elkay sink catalog seems to have disappeared. Graham

Here's the CPU Boss comparison between my former system and my recent upgrade. As you can see the benchmarks show in most cases a 4 fold improvement. Considering the old system cost about $2,400 and my new Alienware cost about $1,500 it was a real bargain. http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Quad-Q6600-vs-Intel-Core-i7-6700K Graham

Those are good ones Larry. Here's another site that lets you pit one CPU against another. http://cpuboss.com/ Just need to keep a perspective on the numbers. In most cases a 10% variance will likely not be noticeable to most users. In fact when it comes to CPU's I really think you need to look for at least double performance gains when upgrading in order to really obtain a truly noticeable real world improvement. Graham

Just to quantify when I say no sense of lag, my file size is usually around 20-30 Meg. I have downloaded the Riverstone plan from Chief which is almost 90 Meg. Yes there is a difference in responsiveness, which is usually only noticeable when zooming in and out. Otherwise everything works fine, even when a raytrace is running in the background. Concerning the Undo command, this will inherently take some time, maybe 1-3sec. I personally do not consider this to be a lag, The undo has to recompute things to bring the plan back to it's former state and then regenerate the image/screen, which will always take a bit of time. Graham

My sense is that this happens when the total amount of light in the scene is way to high or being emitted from a single point. I try to think about lighting, it's type and position from a photographers perspective. Raytrace is all about light, just as photography is if one ignores composition and artistic factors. Interior photography can be a real challenge as the existing light fixture sources and the available light that enters a room through windows is rarely ideal. A professional photo shoot rarely uses the existing light fixtures as their primary lighting source. The first thing they do is pull out a light meter and scan the room to determine where light is way to intense or too low, too intense will blow-out the highlights and too low will hide details. They balance this out with additional lights and diffusers to even out the ambient light, on a really bright day they will place diffusers outside too cut down on the intense light streaming through the window. In many cases they also swap out the light bulbs in the existing fixtures to control these. Once I started to think this way my raytraces improved significantly and when there was a problem it was much easier to look at the scene and identify the culprit. Graham

Rashid, I am suprised you are experiencing lag to the point that you draw cabinets as lines. Yes sometimes for me an undo will take maybe 5 sec. which in computer terms seems forever. Your AMD FX-8350 is fairly decent. Prior to my recent upgrade I was running an Intel Quad Core Q6600. I really only upgraded to get faster raytrace times, which are now on average 4 times quicker and for smoother task switching only while the raytrace was running. This was the primary issue, the Q6600 was slow to respond to interrupts when running flat-out. Maybe you should check into things a bit deeper to see if there is not something running in the background that is creating an issue. Graham

The struggle is that Blazing Fast is a relative term when it comes to computers, it's also very challenging when a budget is involved. From the posters in this forum it is apparent that there is a wide range of users, those running smaller models such as myself for kitchen/interior design all the way up to massive models for multi-storey construction and publication quality renderings. As such, the type of system needed for the former is drastically different than what is required for the latter. It can easily be the difference between spending $1,500 or $6,000 or more per system. Users need to evaluate the type of software they use, how extensively they use it and the features they use. This needs to be taken into account along with your workflow style and set-up. Some users work on a massive Chief model, Raytrace in the background, edit high res pics in Photoshop, video edit, browse and more all at the same time. If this is your workflow situation then the reality is you are most likely into the higher $ range. For myself, I run smaller models on Chief, a raytrace in the background, MS Office and browser with the odd photo editing here and there. For this, my recently purchased $1,500 Alienware R3, Skylake 6700K, 8GB Ram and Navida GTX 745 runs everything without any sense of lag whatsoever. Given this, the only possible real gain that I could realize by spending more money would be faster Ratraces, and in order to significantly reduce these times I would have to scale up to a dual Zeon configuration which would easily cost an addition $2,000 or more than my current system. Graham

I posted this link a few days ago. http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/6389/nvidia-geforce-gtx-960-4gb-review-what-difference-does-extra-vram-make This is focused on 2GB versus 4GB Ram graphic cards . Results are interesting and may be relevant to users trying to keep their cost down. It's also worth noting as the articles author does, minor test differences, say under 10%, are not likely to be noticeable in real world situations by most users. I try to keep this in mind when evaluating any computer related component, it's very easy to get hung-up on an insignificant difference and believe that this will make or break your system. Graham

Agree Larry. At the end of the day this will happen with almost any software. Put a high enough resolution pic in Photoshop with many layers and the same thing will happen. Consumer and even semi-commercial systems all have there limits. My suggestions were aimed primarily to users attempting to squeeze every available bit of performance out of their systems or as a way to identify the most significant bottle-neck so the could make the best future purchasing decision. By the way, where is the real world results you posted? Thanks, Graham

When a system gets laggy you need to access the root cause to determine if this is software or hardware related. Obviously lag is the end result of your system being stressed, this may be the processor, graphics card, hard drive access or a combination of all three. This stressing may be caused by one particular software program or in many cases the accumulative effect of running many programs at the same time (multi-tasking). There are also instances were a background service may be running abnormally which is hogging your processor or hard drive, have encountered this with windows file search & indexing service, antivirus programs can also do this. The easiest way to get a picture of this is to open up the task manager to monitor the running processes and their cpu, hard drive & ram demands. With all your normal software loaded but not actually running anything such as a raytrace or video your cpu % usage should likely be below 5%, your ram (memory) should likely be below 80% and your hard drive should only be a few %. On my system the idle numbers are cpu 1%, ram 65%, hard drive 0%. This tells me that there is nothing of significance running in the background that would take away resources from my main programs. If these numbers are high you need to see what services or programs are causing this and then determine if they are necessary. There is no benefit having some antivirus program constantly scanning your system. If all is ok during idle then start using your programs and continue to monitor their cpu, ram & hard drive usage. You will quickly see which software package and what activity places the most demand on your system resources. Keep in mind that the numbers will bounce around and there will be times when these may approach or be at 100%, this is normal. However if they stay steady state at a high percentage then you may start to experience a lag. Just a note, when raytracing your cpu will likely be flat-out 100%, this is normal and will be the case no matter how fast a processor you have if you have all cores assigned under render preferences. This is actually a good test situation to evaluate your processors interrupt handling, it's often related to lag. In the task manager you can display the cpu usage in a graphical format, run a raytrace, the graph will flat line at 100%, then perform some other activity, say load a program. CPU usage should instantly drop and then jump back to 100%. The longer this takes the greater the lag. You are seeing a representation as to how long it takes your processor to switch from one task to another. Newer processors do a much better job at handling interupts than older ones. If you are a heavy raytracer you can reduce this lag effect by reducing the core assignment in render preferences, usually a reduction by one core will be sufficient. Your raytrace will run a bit slower but the lag will be reduced or eliminate. Play with this to find the right balance. There are specific monitoring programs for graphics cards which will tell you how hard they are working. In general your graphics card will develop lag if you are running other graphic intensive programs concurrently with Chief, such as a video, a game or even web browsing. As with the main processor your graphics processor must rapidly switch back and forth between these running programs. If you need all of this stuff running then a better graphics card is needed. The graphics processor is more important than the total ram if cost is a factor. Graham

My guess without seeing the plan is that the scene is being lit by a single high intensity point light. Your first posted image has a huge blown-out spot on the ceiling. Try reducing this lights intensity and add some additional lights to more evenly distribute the light throughout the room. Keep in mind that as you add lights you will need to reduce their intensity so the total wattage (lumens) does not become excessive for the rooms size. Graham

Thanks Micheal, went back and reviewed your post, you nailed it!!! Appears that if there is no defined exterior finish then the intersecting interior walls flash through, and as you stated the material region interprets them as openings and such it wraps around them accordingly. Graham

Just curious if any other members have confirmed this to be the case. "Wall Specifications", "Wall Type", "Define". Graham

The issue is that the wall definition for the foundation wall type does not have a defined exterior finish. It is in the main layer, just move up and all problems are gone. Graham

Have not test x8 yet, but this has always been an issue. Cabinets with multiply door sections can't be controlled individually for hardware, it's all or nothing. You either have to turn off the hardware and float-in the hardware where you need it or stack individual cabinets together so they can be independently controlled. For decorative side panels I usually float-in a separate door panel versus using the cabinet feature. This allows complete control over the panel and can adjust it's width to overlap the protruding face door, which is my preferred look. Graham

Looks like that but I played with a simple model and could not replicate it no matter what I did with the interior walls. They always snapped properly to the inside face as they should. Even extended an invisible wall through and it did not disrupt the siding finish. Played with the wall material region, changed thickness, cut finish on/off, etc, everything worked as it should. The problematic plan needs to be posted. This was done on X7. Graham

It's all in good fun!!! It's also a great way to learn, adds a bit of motivation as we work to explain our points of view. Graham

Joe, I know that the information and capability exists. Unfortunately not all software is written/designed in a way to easily accommodate full scaling. This issue is highly evident in Website design, in the past everything was based upon a typical fixed sized screen layout. Today screens vary widely in both physical size and pixel density. New properly designed websites now retrieve the screen characteristics which defines the overall available area, the inside layout/structure is then defined relative to this. Even this has it's limitations and as you mention graphic elements are a different challenge over text and layout structure. Pinch/Zoom on touch screen phones, tablets and now monitors are good examples where straight forward magnification is being used. Text is fine as fonts are designed for scaling but images start to fall apart if their base resolution is too low and the big penalty is that you reduce the amount of visible information as you zoom in. Graham

Unfortunately I don't think time travel has not been discovered here. I believe that the "Created Date" is the date that the file was placed in it's current directory, which may or may not be related to it's original date of creation. Graham

You must be wearing your more expensive glasses, font size has been lowered. Just Kidding!! Unfortunately there is no way to adjust scaling for an individual program. Windows settings does permit scaling, but it will effect every program. The only issue with this is that not everything scales properly, especially if you set things too large. It all depends on how the software defines the screen and positioning of elements, most use a combination of absolute and relative position and sizing values and as such an overall DPI scaling factor can result in some unusual effects. Things should improve in the future though as this is becoming more important due to the wide range of screen sizes coming into the market. Until then I, like you, have to put my reading glasses on. Graham

That's why I covered my butt by saying "just a guess". Looking closer the siding breaks do appear to align with the interior wall intersects as you noted. If the plan was posted then maybe it could be resolved in less than 13 posts. Only 7 postings left to go after this one. Graham