Viewport performance - Referencing

Michael Mayer

Usually I try to keep my whole project in a single file.
(To prevent Layer duplication, keep resource editing consistent, ...)

But for larger projects I see lags in yiewport performance and editability,
like with Structure Panel control andnavigation.

Would I benefit in any way by separating geometries in separate files
and by referencing these in ?
(When I need to have everything in context anyway)

I am not sure but for me it feels like just temporarily hiding parts of the
project does not really better viewport performance (?)
Would Referencing help ?
Is the use of Blocks for any repetitive element also accelerating OpenGl
or is in the end everything stored as individual triangles in OpenGl anyway ?

Stefaan Coddé

As usual with performance You should mention OS, how many ram, which videocard, harddisk or SSD as work partition and the resolution of Your desktop and if this is a laptop ,

If I open a 100 MB DWG , this goes fast since Pci-e SSD and once open Bricscad works fine Video related sure with 3D drawing no frames lost when zoom in into the 3D , I swapped my very old NVIDIA 4000 with a Radeon FX580 8GB GDDR5 which is also far from fastest cards but 4K at 60hz possible A 1080p desktop needs far less video performance compared with a 4K desktop.

Michael Mayer

latest Windows 10
Ryzen 3950X, 64 GB RAM, RX6800 16 GB VRAM, NVme system drive,
SATA SSDs or Network SSD for data.
24" 4k Monitor 60 Hz at 175% scale

Related File Sizes,

• a very large but pretty geometry optimized project, 220 MB Bricscad DWG
• a raw 255 MB Revit import, proper Solids, 1800 Blocks, 55 MB Bricscad DWG
• a raw 505 MB IFC import, proper Solids, 3000+ Blocks, 955 MB Bricscad DWG
• (No problems with an optimized 65 MB Project)

Bricscad and other CAD or 3D Apps are manually registered in Windows Graphics
Settings to use RX6800 at full power.
I am usually using less than half of the RAM, VRAM usage about 1/10 of available
and never saw my GPU using more than 20 %.
Tried to deactivate viewport AA that didn't noticeably help.

I assume some bottlenecking, room for viewport and data handling performance
improvements, as the same imports in Vectorworks work flawlessly in real time.

But for now, my questions is more about how I can optimize my project organization
to get the best performance from BC status quo.
In the past I only used References for Underlays, the whole Building(s) data was kept
in one working file.

Michael Mayer

Hmmh,

went through those files again and it looks like even the

• a raw 505 MB IFC import, proper Solids, 300+ Blocks, 955 MB Bricscad DWG

navigates in 3D View reasonably now ....

Needed RAM for DMAUDITALL/Fix (14500 elements) is 47 GB, running 16 cores at 100%.
OK, but crashed Bricscad nevertheless ....

Chiyan

Hi Michael,

To elaborate more on your question, it is indeed better to split up big models and use Xreferences to improve performance, this is explained a little bit more in the conference video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYXGtq69fZA&t=684s

I'm not very familiar with computer specifications but this also might help if you have an NVIDIA GPU as well as an integrated graphics processor, please do to increase BricsCAD performance:
Open NVIDIA control panel > Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings > Add > Select BricsCAD V21, and set the preferred graphics processor to 'High-performance NVIDIA processor'

Lastly, some extra tips for settings and solutions to get better performance in BricsCAD: https://blog.bricsys.com/10-tips-for-faster-bim-reduce-ifc-file-size/

Kind regards,
Chi-Yan

Michael Mayer

Thanks a lot Chi-Yan,

great answers.
Thanks for the Video Link. So Referencing helps indeed.

I will try to separate things into separate Referenced Files.
I am just a bit concerned about the extra effort to access files for editing,
Layer Visibility switching because of redundant "$Layer" duplicates and
if it will also help in View Navigation, when I need to see the whole Model
with all XREFs in my global Model File.

I have no integrated CPU graphics, just a dedicated AMD PCI card, allowed
to run at full power by Windows Energy Saving Settings.

For the Link of the Blog Post.
I have seen it before. The problem is that first Tips are about deactivating
Features which I want to keep or have, like BIM, Solids, ...

I have to rethink my real needs and think about where Referencing separation
is viable for me.