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?