I just purchased Onecnc XR Mill Pro which I'm liking more every day but all those cool graphic simulations and live rotate and pan were very jerky, like watching a movie at 3 frames per second verses 30.
I have a desktop PC with a 2.26ghz pentium 4, 533mhz front side buss and 500mb of ram, translation while its not a cutting edge 3.4ghz model this is a fast pc by any standard...but not fast enough it seems for CAD/CAM animations.
A 3.4ghz pentium upgrade might improve things somewhat but I thought maybe I just need to upgrade the video card? I did some research on-line and most reviews suggested that while gaming video cards are good for games they are not generally a good choice for CAD/CAM applications which place different types of loads on the card. But I did come across one CAD/CAM video card review about a year old that included some high end game cards and the performance was close to the lower end CAD/CAM cards and in some cases better.
It was an easy choice, once I recovered from the sticker price shock of CAD/CAM specific video cards I decided to go with a high end game card and just live with whatever level of performance it offered.
I selected the very new PNY GeForce 6800gt video card, this is one of the latest offerings from Nvidia. My existing video card was a GeForce 4400, a good fast card in its day that ran everything I threw at it smoothly until I asked it to animate some Onecnc XR CAD/CAM stuff.
Okay so what was the result? The results were WOW!!! Rotating, simulating and preview animations run very smooth, a huge improvement over what I was seeing before. I feel like I saved quite a bundle of money going this route, the performance is very acceptable and all I did was upgrade the video card. Currently $399 at CompUSA and that includes a free copy of the new Doom3. Hey if you don't want to blast the crap out of the bad guys you can always ebay it for $30 and buy some tooling!
