Thinking of upgrading my MAC COMPUTER, should I?


dshall
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46 minutes ago, Electromen said:

Scott, I have a six core Mac Pro with dual video cards.  How can I help with a test?

I'm using x9.

 

OMG,  I would love to do a GOTOMEETING with you tomorrow if possible.  I will send you my file and I would love to see you work with it.  I think I can do 9:30 PST tomorrow morning or later.  What works for you?  Thank you thank you.

 

uh oh,  X9?  Maybe I can find an x9 file that you can work with.  

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17 hours ago, Electromen said:

Scott, I have a six core Mac Pro with dual video cards.  How can I help with a test?

I'm using x9.

 

Hi Greg,  thank you for doing a GTM with me this morning.  Much appreciated.

 

For the rest of you,  the performance of CA on Greg's Pro was not really any better than on my 4 year old computer. BTW,  his Pro is the same age as my IMAC.  

 

So I have compared my 4 year old IMAC to Greg's 4 year old PRO to my new IMAC......  none of the MAC's out did the other that I can see.

 

I am now going to return my new IMAC to Apple and if I get a chance,  I will test drive the NEW IMAC PRO.  If that doesn't blow my socks off,  I am sticking with my 4 year old computer.

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That sucks. Since this is our livelihood I think many of us are willing to throw cash at some new hardware but not if there aren't noticeable improvements in performance. So what's the end game? Chief gets larger with more (admittedly great) features and just slows down until what? Hopefully a new MAC Pro will get you the performance you need...

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13 minutes ago, dshall said:

I am now going to return my new IMAC to Apple and if I get a chance,  I will test drive the NEW IMAC PRO.  If that doesn't blow my socks off,  I am sticking with my 4 year old computer.

 

That was a very revealing exercise and it will be interesting to see how the newer IMAC Pro does. I think what is happening here is that the single thread performance is the most crucial issue concerning the slowness being experienced. This is primarily related to the base & boost frequency of the CPU and unfortunately the newer CPU's are not really that much better than your current one. They have done a great job in increasing core count but once you have 4 hyper-threaded cores it dose not provide much benefit unless you are running very specific software such as Ray Trace that are designed to take advantage of all those cores.

 

The other issue relates to the law of diminishing returns in conjunction with exponential cost. With the current state of most of our systems we are faced with an extremely high cost to get a relatively small performance improvement. In the past, I used to be able to by a new system that was at least double the power of my older system for less than what I paid for my older system. Today, to get the equivalent doubling, if I can, I would likely have to spend about 3 times the price of my current system

 

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40 minutes ago, dshall said:

 

I wonder how your machine would handle my large file?  Do you have time for a quick GTM?

 

 

Thanks P.  for your time in a GTM.  Again,  no luck finding a computer that can handle my file.

 

 

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55 minutes ago, dshall said:

 

Thanks P.  for your time in a GTM.  Again,  no luck finding a computer that can handle my file.

 

 

Have you been able to test an iMac Pro? For a while I had pondered upon the idea of buying an older Mac Pro 12 cores, so that I could easily update the video card, ram etc. 

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I think it might be a Chief problem ,or a bringing plans forward a few versions. My machine is a couple years old now and slow with Scott's plan which is a large plan with lots of custom stuff.  I usually do not see the slowness but very rarely get that kind of project. You may not find a computer that will run that job very fast. Check with the next update and see.

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On 2/2/2018 at 9:22 AM, dshall said:

BTW,  a real nuisance these days is the lag when opening up a DBX.  I am opening DBX for symbols all the time,  1 second time a lot equals a lot of wasted time.

 

 

I have a Mac almost identical to the one you just bought/returned and noticed the same lag in opening a DBX....very irritating. But only in X10. No such problem in X9. 

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16 hours ago, Electromen said:

Scott, When we were testing my Mac Pro, you had the Layout page open and updating it was the slowest process.  I never have the Layout page open until I'm ready to print.

Do you normally edit with Layouts open?

 

I believe we need to have layout open when updating layout.  At one time I worked with layout open but I have not been able to for the last few versions because of the lag.  I  hope CA will consider doing something to speed  up the program for the larger files.....  50 mb and larger for me.

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I was rummaging around looking to see if there was a way to improve single core performance (because of Graham's observations). In the course of that I ran across some comparitive information on CPU performance using 3DS Max and Revit. I found it interesting and perhaps more useful than some of the benchmarks stuff I usually run across which often appears aimed at gamers.  There is info relevant to i-7 (6th to 8th gen) Xeon, and Ryzen, that I found interesting, might be worth a read. There are a bunch of other articles there and I'm going to go back an rummage around more.

Revit Article

3DS article

Coffee Lake article

 

I'd think about running both GPU-Z and CPU-Z to understand what is going on with Chief. I agree that the public beta has performance issues and I believe they will improve with final releases (at least hope so), not sure how much is all.

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I don't think it has anything to do with whether it's a Mac or Windows.

 

I don't have it pinned down yet but it appears to be related to whether or not the DBX shows a render of an object in combination and for some unknown reason the graphics card/chip. Maybe someone can confirm this, if I go to defaults and say it's a window and change the symbol render technique to say a plan I find that when I open the symbol DBX the rendering technique did not change to the new default, it still renders as a vector. What I'm also experiencing is that when I run the same plan on two different systems, one with an integrated chip(HD620) and one with a discrete graphics card(GTX 745) the vector view performance is distinctly different. What's most interesting is that the HD620 is the one that runs the best. Also when I monitor my CPU & GPU usage it is completely different, the HD620 shows most of the load is on the GPU but on the GTX 745 it shows a very high load on the CPU. This only seems to occur when the view is line based such as vector views. Something just seems very odd about this.

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49 minutes ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

.... the HD620 shows most of the load is on the GPU but on the GTX 745 it shows a very high load on the CPU. .......

 

This stuff is over my pay grade,  but when at the apple store,  using the MACPRO,  it was the CPU that was being heavily taxed.  The guy at the apple store said it might be helpful if the program was using more of the graphics card.

 

BTW,  we were monitoring this when UPDATING ALL VIEWS IN LAYOUT.  

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1 hour ago, jbaehmer said:

Go PC regardless ;)

We can give it a go on my computer tomorrow AM if you would like?  I like to think I have descent computer speed....

 

Thanks JB,  but I doubt your machine will be any different than the machines I have already tested. 

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5 minutes ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

Fixed the overall vector performance view issue, in preferences render there is an option for Horizon Lines, unchecking this solved my issue. By default this is checked.

 

Still have not found a way to change the default view type in a DBX, always shows in vector view.

 

Whoa,  when somebody suggested unchecking a default  (I do not remember what),  CA came aboard and said DON'T DO THIS...  so I hope CA will chime in here and let us know what to do.  BTW,  below is what my default is.

 

Hey Graham,  thanks tons for sticking with this.  The lack of performance is really going to hurt us unless this gets resolved before final release.

 

5a7739c4c57c9_ScreenShot2018-02-04at8_48_07AM.thumb.png.64edb7c86c4f28ffb65d6146111b5648.png

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28 minutes ago, dshall said:

 

The guy at the apple store said it might be helpful if the program was using more of the graphics card.

 

It certainly seems that way.  When I monitor the CPU and GPU usage there are many times when the CPU is running high and the GPU is low in instances when I would expect the opposite. I can only think of two reasons for this, there are extensive CPU based operations that need done before things can be sent to the GPU or there is a glitch that is preventing the GPU from being fully recognized.

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