Autocad Rendering.
 

So recently I started doing alot more 3d rendering at work on autocad. And Ive found since I upgraded to autocad 08 that my computer has not ran as fast as when I used 04.

My old specs were:
Stock Video
512mb Ram
300watt generic PSU

New Parts:
NVIDIA QUADRO FX 3400 256MB
4 gig's of ram
500watt Antec PSU.

Now I know the psu wont help performance. But between the ram and video do you guys think I will be able render in autocad better? Is there anything else you guys think would be a good performance upgrade for autocad?

Are you talking about reponsiveness while you're working in the program or the time it actually takes to render the final images?

More RAM and a better video card will make working within the program more responsive, but it probably won't improve your final rendering time that much. This is because what you see while the working in the program uses your video card, but when you do a final render out to images or a movie, it's computed on your CPU. To get the most improvement in your rendering time, it'd be best to upgrade your processor.

Muy perfecto. :thumbsup:

For raw rendering, the CPU does the brunt of the work. Buy the fastest damned Core 2 Duo you can afford for that.

The long or the short answer from an Architect?

The Short answer is above. You'll get more responsive on screen time. Rendering , won't do squat.

You could have the most powerful quad core CPU and the newest 8800 GPU and still won't help you.

Look here for the list of recomended cards where the GPU will do some of the render crunching:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet...linkID=9240618

Looks like your Quadro is there.

Any other card will work great for on screen work, but only those cards work to render becuase they are all hardware based solutions that don't pass the buck by doing software emulation for anything. Most cards do not have full hardware compression and decompression. Not even most hard core gamers play games that can take advantage of it.

We run all machines at 4GB of DDR2 in the office and we still freeze up and have to walk away for a cup of coffee sometimes. Not that it is a bad thing.:thumbsup:

Thanks for the reply guys.

One thing I am hoping these new hardware choices will get me is better stability. I am having alot of trouble in Autocad 2008 with it crashing on me. Some reason it likes to crash while tring to print. Not sure what that is. In 04 it never did that.

Right now a new processor is not a option. Hopefully with more ram and better video card it will work alittle better. Seems like I have alot of trouble when using models. Always glitching on the shading and such.

I have herd that 4gb of ram can almost hirt your system more than your help. With Win XP Pro is 4gb to much and should of just put in 3gb?

Also Arch what is that link about. It took me to a credit card add or sumtin.

Thanks for the input.

Fixed the link. Sorry, copied the address from the wrong tab at the time. :shakehead:

4GB may be more than XP can address. I thought 4BG was the ceiling, not above it. I know we have 4 sticks of 1GB dual channel DDR2 here.

Also, make sure you have at least 2BG of disk space for cache

32-bit OSs can't use more than 3 GB of RAM. Having 4 won't hurt but the last 1 GB will never be used unless you use a 64-bit OS (XP or Vista or some 64-bit Linux).

Thanks for the reply guys. :-)