Is it primarily the cpu or the video board responsible for slow zoom?

RoatanBill

I have an NVIDIA Corporation GP107GL [Quadro P400] board in a may years old machine (Intel® Core™ i5-4570 CPU @ 3.20GHz × 4). When I zoom a dense 3D drawing, it takes many seconds for the video to stabilize and sometimes I overshoot to produce a postage stamp size image on the screen to then have to fix that wasting even more time.

I realize both components aren't super high horsepower, but if I want to upgrade, what should I concentrate money on, the CPU or the video board to counter this annoying zoom issue on BricsCAD Platinum 20.2.10/Ubuntu?

Michael Mayer

It is mainly the GPU power but also the amount of its VRAM.
For larger drawings and multi monitor usage, VRAM just has
to be "enough".
(If not enough it will get really slow)

But it does not make sense to put all money in a GPU over a weak
system. E.g. if the CPU isn't fast enough to feed your GPU, you can't
use all of the GPU power.

You do not need the more expansive Quadro pro GPU series.
Bricscad, like many other usual CAD don't make use of Pro GPU
features. Standard Gaming GPUs are either faster or cheaper.
If you are on Linux you may prefer AMD GPUs

RoatanBill

Thanks for the information.

I've stayed away from AMD when purchasing CPU's, mobos, etc to build boxes because Intel has better single thread performance for the money. If BricsCAD could take significant advantage of multi thread cpu's abilities, I'd go AMD since they are better multi threaded for the money spent.

I'm not a gamer so everything I use is a single threaded app. I know BricsCAD has a multi threaded ability, but as I understand it, it only kicks in rarely since CAD isn't all that amenable to multi processing.

For a while, I used my mobo's Intel graphics and that was slow as molasses and is why I bought the P400 board.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

Michael Mayer

But basically what you want for Bricscad (Vectorworks, Microstation, ...)
is just a standard gaming Computer.
It should give you the best bang for the buck and a large variety
for any kind of planned budget.

(Just most Autodesk Products (and Catia and such) get and profit from
Pro GPUs pro divers - on Windows)

Nothing against current 12ish Intel CPU generation or Nvidia GPUs.
Yes single core Performance (max Boost frequency), fast memory and SSD
is what you notice in CAD 80 % of time.
I am no more sure what MT options V22 already had, but I am sure there
was MT for loading files and loading drawing window.
Something I could notice obviously if on or off.

It is just that you are on Linux, that my Nvidia GPU ran better with their
proprietary GPU driver. But sometimes when the driver update was not
ready and I upgraded the kernel, I was backt to VGA for a months or so ....
And I lost 2 of 3 Linux installation when switching back to an AMD card.
Basically I also had trouble with any new/current hardware on Linux,
as long as it did not mature for 12 months or so.

RoatanBill

I was on proprietary Nvidia drivers for a while and then Ubuntu started having a version that updated via the normal update method. Before, every new kernel install got me a trashed video environment till I reinstalled the proprietary Nvidia drivers. I didn't notice any benefit in BricsCAD for either driver, so I kept the Ubuntu supplied version due to convenience.

I just checked and my box is 7 years old. I didn't think it was that old. I guess it's time to spend a few bucks.

Thanks

RoatanBill

Michael:
This is an FYI.

I upgraded my box to Ubuntu V 22.04.1 LTS and the speed improvement in zooming that I was complaining about before is solved. I can now zoom almost instantly to where ever I want. The difference is an order of magnitude better.

Michael Mayer

Great !

ALANH

One of the things not mentioned was RAM I played with a old pc 4Gb found some chips and made it 8GB its performance was just vastly improved, your new one how much Ram ? I would not use less than 16Gb. Some other posters have like 64GB.

RoatanBill

I have 16GB and my monitoring app shows the vast majority of it is unused.

vanuan

I think it's some kind of a bug. Zooming in the model space while looking at the drawing layout is slow. When I switch to the paper space, the zoom is fast. When it somehow switches back to the model space, zooming becomes very slow. When I'm zooming in the model tab, it's very fast. So it seems to be the issue is the projection of a model to a paper space. Maybe it recalculates the scale or doing some other unnecessary calculations.