Best hardware upgrade for C3D with Aerial Images?

[Reem_Mcconnell]

Hi,
My customer wants to buy a new workstation.
He mainly does 2D work in Civil 3d with aerial imagery in the background. Photos are 10cm resolution.
I'd like to know what's the hardware bottle neck usually for aerial images?
What will make his images load faster in C3D? Is it a faster graphics card? A video card with more video RAM on it? The CPU? The amount of RAM? The speed of RAM? The speed of the SSD?

We'll put a i9-10900 processor in it, so I think that the CPU won't be the bottleneck here. We plan for 32GB of RAM and a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB NVME SSD.

I mean, if we want his images to load faster and have snappier zoom in and out, where should we invest first? A better graphics card or just more RAM, for example?

[BIGAL]

Having worked with images all the time in CIV3d my only comment is that we would normally turn them off when doing design so can only see strings etc. never really had any problems zooming etc a slowing down is more likely from surface issues and now with point clouds data sets are huge.

 

If doing say a freeway would tile the images, so only have turned on in the area where working, rather than 1 big one.

 

The specs are sounding impressive. 

 

 

Edited March 28, 2021 by BIGAL

[Reem_Mcconnell]

3 hours ago, BIGAL said:

If doing say a freeway would tile the images, so only have turned on in the area where working, rather than 1 big one.

The specs are sounding impressive. 

 

 

Hi BIGAL,

Thanks for the tips.  Can C3D tile a bigger image into a subset of smaller ones? Or do you use another software to do that.?

 

We want to build a custom PC for him. The problem is, right now, there's a shortage of graphics cards. They're out of stock everywhere. So we might just by a temporary used video card while we wait for the real deal. Or we might just use the integrated Intel UHD 630. 

 

Do any of you ever used, just the integrated video card to work on C3D with images in background?

[rkmcswain]

I don't have a concrete answer to your question, but I would certainly agree with @BIGAL - less image will give better performance than more image.

 

What display adapter are you aiming for? We had to wait awhile to get hold of a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 

[Reem_Mcconnell]

1 hour ago, rkmcswain said:

What display adapter are you aiming for? We had to wait awhile to get hold of a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 

 

I wish we could put our hands on an RTX 2080 Ti!!!

 

We're looking for either a GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8GB, an RTX 3060 Ti 8GB, or really any card of this caliber we could get our hands on, for around  525$USD or less.

 

Anything above or equal to a GTX 1080 6GB would be awesome, really.

 

 

[BIGAL]

Re tiling I am sure there is software out there for tiling an image, we had the advantage of direct access to GIS aerial database so yes would do smaller tiles manually. It was only really a problem when doing diagonal orientation roads.

[Reem_Mcconnell]

14 hours ago, rkmcswain said:

What display adapter are you aiming for? We had to wait awhile to get hold of a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 

How did you get a hold on one anyways?

 

Did you just place a backorder somewhere and wait for it with no ETA?

[SLW210]

I xref the images and never have a problem from the images.

 

I think you would be better off with the latest Xeon processor and best clock speed for a professional workstation (or the AMD equivalent). Several articles I have read AutoCAD likes a fast workstation CPU. The i9 is not a bad choice, but I didn't see a huge price difference myself.

 

Navigate the Evolving Choices for CAD Workstation CPUs, Part 1 | Cadalyst

(Highlighting mine)

Quote

the only compromise a Core buyer would need to make is to sacrifice RAS and ECC support. As explored in last month’s column, RAS and ECC can provide an additional degree of reliability when uptime and accuracy is of ultimate importance, but if the cost of choosing Xeon — paying a premium for both Xeon and the Microsoft-mandated OS — is substantial, buyers are now more likely than they previously were to stick with Core.

 

HP Workstation-Xeon W-2223 3.6 GHz - vPro - 32 GB RAM 2666MHz - SSD 512 GB with NVIDIA Quadro P2200 5 GB, was the best I could get without backorder (HP is what IT requested). 

 

IMO, any gaming graphics card over $200 USD is plenty for most AutoCAD work. When I worked at home last year, my old Core2 Quad 2.66 GHz, 8 GB RAM WIN 10 PRO computer and 600 series gamer card ran AutoCAD 2021 and some verticals very well, and yes, I worked on some maps and area layouts at home, no problems. All of the cards you mention are well over $525 USD, I see some available on Amazon.

 

But, I'll only use Quadro cards at work if possible . There IS a difference, however slight..SEE THIS and  CADALYST White Paper. A good article for powerful yet minimum CAD station (sort of) by Robert Green.

[rkmcswain]

10 hours ago, Reem_Mcconnell said:

How did you get a hold on one anyways?

 

Did you just place a backorder somewhere and wait for it with no ETA?

 

Haha.... I have a local PC builder who just knows how to get stuff.

But yeah, we had to wait a few weeks. 

[Reem_Mcconnell]

Hi SLW210,

Thanks for all the links. Very nice. I'm reading "Minimum CAD Workstation Specs for 2021" right now.

 

About the CPUs, here's a comparison of Single Thread Performance for either Desktop CPUs or Server CPUs (Just click on the "CPU Mark" button next to "Desktop" OR "Server").

The i9 single thread speed is over most of Xeon CPUs. But I can understand that, in certain scenarios, someone would need ECC RAM, and would have no choice to get a Xeon.

[Reem_Mcconnell]

Link mentionned above: 

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