sam_m writes:
> I'm a design engineer that uses something called Autodesk Inventor - ...
Ahh, brings back memories... *sigh* I was using Inventor back in the early 1990s when it
was still all-SGI, all OGL, and incidentally indeed all single-threaded. I developed a bunch of
3D tests based on it for SGI systems, though these ended up being somewhat CPU bound for
large models (viewing the same model in perfly could be an order of magnitude faster). See:
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/perfcomp.html
It's the "Inventor 3D (single-buff)" link, top-left.
> OpenGL.They're both single-threaded applications (at the time of writing) so there is no
After all these years and they didn't change it. Pretty lame really.
Oddly enough though, this means you're exactly the kind of user who would - on a budget - get
good results from the kind of oc'd dual-core systems I've been testing, eg. i3 550 in the 4.7 to
5GHz range.
> creating the models - how can the calculations be paralleled when feature y cannot be
> considered without first calculating feature x? ...
Perhaps the nature of Inventor has changed, but back when I was using it the system could
certainly have been threaded, but performance in that sense wasn't its focus at the time, and
it certainly wasn't intended as the basis for a CAD system (VRML was more the target market
back then; I was using it for undersea ocean systems modelling).
> moved to DirectX about 6-7 years ago with their first Vista release. When they were programming
And behold I am become Vista, the destroyer of worlds. :}
> over to DirectX, all those years ago, there is still confusion in the Inventor community over the
> need/benefits of these workstation cards as there is a general lack of information and education
In reality you'd see a bigger gain by having a much quicker CPU. Just look at my i3 550 results
with the Quadro600 for many of the tests.
> again, I believe these kind of comments are related to the OpenGL environment and the better
Hmm, I'm not sure that an app using OGL rather than DirectX would affect exactly how a GPU
will render a texture wrt mipmap quality... I wouldn't have thought so. Comments blazorthon?
Not sure myself.
> there's almost an unlimited range of "professional" software...
Doesn't help that Autodesk now owns almost all of them. Very unhealthy IMO. The media is
quick to pounce on competition issues wrt high street banking & all sorts of other areas, but
when it comes to sw we can end up with one corp owning the whole show & nobody seems
to care. Remember the days when Max was cheap & Maya was expensive? It's the other
way round now...
Anyway, sorry I can't help with DX pro benchmarks. I'm kinda limited in what tests I can run,
partly due to time constraints.
Ian.
PS. What system do you have btw? Take this to PM/email if preferred (mapesdhs AT yahoo DOT com).