Chief Architect Performance Limitations on Large-Scale Projects

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I’ve been using Chief Architect for over 20 years now and still really enjoy it.

I mainly use it for the design and drafting of Australian and American residential projects, though I occasionally work on commercial and public buildings as well. For those larger projects, I typically switch to AutoCAD for drafting.

 

For a recent 300,000 sqft nursing home project, I initially planned to use Chief for the basic documentation — plans, elevations, and cross sections. However, Chief really struggled with the scale of the model: hundreds of rooms, windows, stairs, and fixtures caused severe lag, even on relatively powerful hardware. In the end, I could only use Chief for 3D design and had to move all the drafting to AutoCAD.

 

A colleague’s newer system handled it slightly better, but we still encountered unbearable delays with every action.

This made me wonder:
Does Chief Architect have inherent limitations in how it utilizes system resources? In other words, if you were to invest in a $10,000 workstation with top-tier CPUs, GPUs, and maximum RAM, would Chief be able to take full advantage of that hardware — or is it simply not optimized for large, complex models (like public buildings with 400+ rooms and heavy detailing)?

 

Should we expect that Chief will always remain better suited for residential and light commercial projects, regardless of system performance?

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This is the response I received from the technical support:

 

Overall, you are correct in that Chief Architect is designed primarily for residential design, and although larger scale, commercial design is certainly doable, there is a limit to the amount of data a plan in Chief Architect can handle. Generally, a more powerful computer that gets closer to our recommended requirements will give better performance, but there's still the limit of the program itself. Here are the recommended requirements if you haven't seen them yet:

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/sysreq.html

What you mentioned there would potentially help; having many individual room definitions has been known to slow plan files down. Mass-selecting your walls, opening them up and checking on No Room Definition would make them lose their room settings like ceilings and floors, but if you're only working in the floor plan view, it might make things more efficient. Doing this only for interior walls and effectively making large rooms that encompass the interior walls may work better for exterior 3D renderings.

We have other techniques for managing slowness, like hiding layers of objects you're not currently working with, among other options, covered in this article:

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00521/troubleshooting-slowness-in-chief-architect-projects.html