New pc for working with BricsCAD and Pointclouds

We mainly work with point clouds within BricsCAD (2D and sometimes BIM). We currently have 2 PCs with the following features:

  • Asus PRIME X299 Motherboard
  • Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-7940X CPU @ 3.10GHz 14 cores
  • 128GB DDR4 3000MHz RAM
  • NVIDIA Quadro P4000
  • Samsung 970 PRO 1TB M.2 for the operating system.
  • Samsung 860 EVO 4TB 2 pieces for storage of the projects.

The reason why we work with 14 cores is because point clouds are also processed in Register360 on these PCs and this program supports multi core.

What we notice is that BricsCAD has difficulty displaying the point clouds when we zoom in or out or when we pan with the image. Also drawing a simple polyline is very choppy. If I lower the maximum number of points from 4,000,000 to 1,000,000 it all goes smoothly.

Now we are about to purchase a new PC for a new employee and we can therefore still determine / adjust the specifications of the PC. What would your advice be for working with BricsCAD and programs such as Register360 and Recap. And what is your opinion on a P4000 vs a GTX 1660 Ti?

Comments

  • Better use a fast GTX model ... we have sometimes problems with some of those "professional" AMD/NVidia cards, they often are slow in GDI/OpenGL (the target CAD/Grpahics system needs to explicitly support those cards by special drivers - not given in AutoCAD/BricsCAD);
    it might help to use older driver versions (we found with both AMD+NVidia).

    Save the money, and invest in more memory and/or faster CPU (the AMD Ryzen with Zen3 >= 8 cores, or similar Intel, see upconing 12000 generation);
    also, have a look at MTFLAGS setting in BricsCAD, might also help :-)

    many greetings !

  • You are using pointclouds directly in Bricscad now?
  • How should MTFLAGS be set, for point clouds?

  • See "Settings" dialog, search for MTFLAGS :
    besides the first 3 bits (1,2,4) for general dwg database loading + display, there is the bit flag 2048 for MT support for MT PointCloud operations
    (available since V21)
    many greetings !

  • Interesting ... any reason why all of those flags shouldn't be set to 'on', to be on the safe side?

  • AFAIK with MTFLAGS on, it is more likely that Bricscad can crash.

    I have all ON nevertheless.
    If tasted e.g. DWG loading multi-threded, you can hardly go back
    watching files opening single-threaded ....

  • Just_Me
    edited June 2022
    I use an X570, 5950X 16 core, 64GB of Ram and an RTX3090 with point clouds on a scratch nvme drive and it works a charm.
  • B450, 3950X, 64 GB slow 2400 MHz RAM and an RX 6800 here.
    For me it works too .....
  • What does 'works a charm' look like? Smooth and instant rotate, pan, zoom of the full PC, albeit with temporary coarsening of the display (acceptable, as it soon pops back)? Or is that too much to ask? I have one on the screen, of 221.3 x 10^6 TotalNrPoints, and it doesn't achieve that, at 20x10^6 PointCloud PointMax displayed on screen (20 is the max tho it says 50 in Help).
    Aorus gamer laptop has i7-10875H 8core, 16GB RAM, RTX2070.
  • I may have the wrong files - but I never experienced Bricscad as one
    of the fastest Apps in View Ports. No matter if Windows or Mac.
    GPU seems to be used but not at 100% like in e.g. Twinmotion.

    also there are longer lags with large data sets when selecting or hiding
    via Structure Tree for me.
  • Going in and out of REFEDIT in Modelspace (which I do all the time, with large (multi element) Blocks) can take 2-5 secs, and Add to Refedit and Remove from Refedit take similar - so it wastes me lots of sitting and waiting repeatedly, rubbish workflow, but has essential benefits so I'm stuck with it. It just must be a v compute-heavy feature.