Tag: performance

RAID on the Cheap: Windows 7 Software RAID

Luke Johnson

Here’s an idea – if you have two old but similarly sized hard drives sitting around, plug them into your Windows 7 PC and create a Striped Volume.

Striping increases the access speed of the drive.

This could be useful when working on a local version of a Revit central file – local disk access speed becomes important in this situation.

Here’s how:

  1. Plug the two extra hard drives into your PC.  Then turn the computer on…
  2. Go to Disk Management (right click on ‘Computer’, then go ‘Manage’)
  3. Delete all unnecessary volumes from these extra drives.
  4. Right click on one of them – New – Striped Volume
  5. Basically follow the prompts – make sure you pick the two correct drives to become part of the Striped configuration.
  6. Choose quick format / NTFS Default allocation size
  7. Enjoy the increased speed of your striped volume.

Please be careful with this process – make sure you understand the pro’s and con’s.  If you do, it can be a inexpensive way to increase your performance while using Revit.

This guy did a comparison on the speed of Windows 7 ‘Striping’ vs hardware RAID0 – and surprisingly, the results were similar.
RAID on the Cheap: Windows 7 Software RAID vs. inexpensive “fake RAID” � Kevin’s Blog

Smoother multitasking while Rendering in Revit

Luke Johnson

Revit 2011 (Mental Ray) utilises all available CPU cores that the OS can ‘see.’  When multitasking, your PC may slow to a crawl after a render begins.  You can limit the amount of CPU time that the Render process sees by either:

  1. Adjusting the ‘Affinity’ to limit the amount of cores the render process can access (using Task Manager).
  2. Adjusting the ‘Priority’ to Low to allow other processes to have more overall CPU time.

Simply open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and then right-click on the render process (fbxooprender2.exe).  You can now adjust the Affinity and Priority.

Video below:

DirectX Runtimes – download

Luke Johnson

As you know, support for DirectX is now an intrinsic part of Revit 3D hardware acceleration mode.

If you wish to install updated DirectX runtimes, go to this link (February 2010 version).

This may or may not help you if you are struggling with DirectX (Direct3D) related problems.

These runtimes are periodically updated. The June 2010 version can be found here.

Revit Hardware – compatibility and performance

Luke Johnson

Revit is a very acceptable OOTB (out of the box) tool. If you are using Revit OOTB, there are really only two variables that determine your productivity. Assuming you have zero customised content, these variables are:

  • your own skill and ability
  • the performance of your computer

We are all working to try and keep our skills on the cutting edge. But is your hardware keeping up its end of the bargain? Our company made a significant investment into some middle to top-of-the-line workstations a few months ago, for which I am very grateful. If you are looking to purchase a new system, or upgrade an existing one, you should definitely review the
Model Performance Technical Note (you may have accessed this via Subscription, but this is a direct link to the PDF).

The following AUGI forum links may also be of assistance to you:

Revit 2010 – Graphics Cards that work (and those that don’t)

Happy with your hardware?

Video card D3D compatibility – Revit 2010 on Vista / Win7

Revit Running on Intel Mac

Non-Mac hardware benchmarks using the 2009 benchmark journal

Rendering speed in Windows 7 64 & Revit 2010 64bit

Feel free to comment if you have any thoughts or recommendations.

Worksharing Monitor – Free System Performance Utility

Luke Johnson

First off, if you are working with Central/Local Files and Worksharing, then I encourage you to head over to Autodesk Subscription, login and get the Worksharing Monitor.

Then, open Revit. Go to the ‘Add-Ins’ tab on the Ribbon, and under the ‘External Tools’ you will find the Worksharing Monitor.

Once you go into the Worksharing Monitor, click the ‘System Performance’ button and a handy little utility will pop up. Enjoy!

Ribbon performance…bring on the Web Update

Luke Johnson

I had a persistent crash when ‘tearing an item off’ the Ribbon, so I logged a Support Request.

The following admission from the Autodesk Support Team representative is quite telling:
“So far we have seen some issue with the ribbon performance. The ribbon performance issue has already been logged with the development team and they are trying to address this issue on the web update. “


Well I hope they ‘succeed’ and don’t just ‘try’! The reply from Support also included a number of steps to try and fix the issue – but I think I might just wait for the Web Update.

One interesting tip from the representative was:
“Disable or Reduce Tooltip Assistance
Set “Options”, “General”, “Tooltip Assistance” to “Minimal” or “None” to increase performance.”

Give it a go – see if it revs up your Revit 2010.