Trying to speed things up - graphics card?

[nelZ]

Hello,

I've 360 on an Intel i5 proc. with 6 gig ram. I bought a Geforce GT730 card and installed. The CD installed the driver then gave me the option of a "gaming" driver. I put that in and it removed the first one. Are gaming optimized drivers going to help with Fusion 360? I don't see much of an improvement. The card is GDDR3 or above as the Autodesk webpage called for.

Thanks!

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[ger21]

A GT730 is a pretty low end card.
How old is your i5?

What are you seeing that's slow? Moving and rotating objects?

I have a GTX 970 and a new i7, and Fusion 360 is very fast. But the GTX 970 is probably 5x faster than a GT 730.

The gaming drivers should be fine.
In Fusion 360, Preferences, try changing the Graphics driver to DirectX 9 and see if that helps. Also try going to the Graphics section and turning down the display options.

If you want it to work faster, the bottom line is that you need better hardware. You CAD experience is proportional to how much you spend on hardware.

[nelZ]

Thanks Gerry,

I've heard alli5's aren't alike as I'm sure. It's 3.2 GHz...4 "cores". The mem is 1 Gig. As I've fooled with it, changing the fancy fancy Windows embellishments helps a lot.
Actually it works worse on my fast comp. at home...an i7-8 cores.
Parallel processing is a bear. Some algorithms have to be processed in a "straight line" so the speed gained is only in housekeeping chores.

Hey MMOE any thoughts?

And Gerry - Thanks for the heads up about the 360 sale. I've crunched some G-code from objects and am happy with the code. Generic G-code is fine for me. I can doctor it for each machine.

BTW ---- got a sales call from Bob today. Shooting a good group. No ill will. Just move on.

[ger21]

I've heard alli5's aren't alike as I'm sure.

I think they're on the 4th or 5th generation. Each tends to be faster than the previous. Clock speed is not always relevant, as newer versions do more per clock cycle.

Actually it works worse on my fast comp. at home...an i7-8 cores.

Is that 8 with hyperthreading, or do you have a $1000 CPU. I have a 5820K, with 6 cores, or 12 with hyperthreading.

[mmoe]

Gerry,
Is that a quad channel memory board with the 5820K? I have the 4820K, which is the older version of the same socket and feel that quad channel memory boards really add a great deal of robustness compared to dual channel memory boards. Not a huge amount faster, but just more reliable in my experience.

I also ended up with the GTX 970. I was considering the Quadro series cards, but after looking into it further, I found that none of the software I have would utilize the difference between the Geforce and the Quadro. For the money, the GTX 970 seems to be a very solid performer so far. I'm running a 4k screen with no slower performance and no issues other than the general lack of support for 4k screens in both Windows and the applications running on it. The extra workspace is really nice, but none of my CAD or CAM software allows you to adjust the size of the icons or text enough to compensate for the massive resolution jump. On my list for feature submissions now while I just get used to it in the interim.

[mmoe]

Thanks Gerry,

I've heard alli5's aren't alike as I'm sure. It's 3.2 GHz...4 "cores". The mem is 1 Gig. As I've fooled with it, changing the fancy fancy Windows embellishments helps a lot.
Actually it works worse on my fast comp. at home...an i7-8 cores.
Parallel processing is a bear. Some algorithms have to be processed in a "straight line" so the speed gained is only in housekeeping chores.

Hey MMOE any thoughts?

And Gerry - Thanks for the heads up about the 360 sale. I've crunched some G-code from objects and am happy with the code. Generic G-code is fine for me. I can doctor it for each machine.

BTW ---- got a sales call from Bob today. Shooting a good group. No ill will. Just move on.

The bigger/badder your multicore processor, the better it will run for Fusion (or Bobcad for that matter). Fusion will peg all cores at pretty much 100% for many of the processes, so running a quad core with comparable speed (in ghz) to a dual core should perform literally about twice as fast. I don't know how much of the processing is done in the GPU additionaly, but I'm guessing it's not nothing, so that's also a factor. The bigger difference the GPU seems to make with Fusion is the "ambient occlusion" appearance to the objects and various other eye candy components of Fusion. You can turn those off if you don't need them in the Fusion settings.

[ger21]

Yes, it's quad channel DDR4 on a 2011-3 motherboard. It's quite a bit more expensive than DDR3. I have 8 4Gig sticks, as it was about $200 cheaper than 4 8 Gig sticks.
I use dual 23" monitors. My eyes aren't good enough for a 4K screen.

The 6 core CPU is only 3Ghz, but I have an all in one water cooler on it, and have it overclocked to 4.2Ghz in Turbo mode. This way it idles at around 1.2Ghz, but anything multithreaded will use all 12 cores at 4.2Ghz.

I'm tempted to get another 970 in SLI. I saw some AutoCAD and Inventor benchmarks that showed a slight improvement with an SLI setup. But to really make a difference, Fusion would need to be changed to utilize the graphics card better (mainly for rendering). This isn't the case right now