Review
ArchiCAD 19: performance BIM With significant speed increases in this bumper update to ArchiCAD, Graphisoft is clearly aiming to get the attention of Autodesk Revit customers who are frustrated with slow model performance. by Martyn Day
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Next generation tools will get peed is something ArchiCAD 19 acceleration from parallelisathat designers have tion of processes not clock always striven for Supplier: Graphisoft cycles. with their tools. Even Price: From £1,699 Website: graphisoft.com Hungary-based developer back in the good old days of Graphisoft has been well 2D CAD, drafters wanted the latest Intel x86 workstations, with ‘masses’ aware of this change and over the past four of RAM (4MB) and powerful graphics releases has been building comprehensive cards, albeit ones capable of providing only multi-core support into its ArchiCAD BIM platform. This parallelises the computing SVGA in 256 colours. Just when we started thinking we had that’s necessary for handling large BIM more than enough power on the desktop, models. However, the latest release, and file exchange ‘just worked’, the indus- ArchiCAD 19 brings a whole new dimentry moved to BIM, which combines 3D sion to using the multi-cores available. geometry, proprietary databases, parametric constraints and rich layers of meta- Predictive performance data, requiring lots of RAM and process- Prior to release 19, ArchiCAD’s multi-core ing power. capability would break up tasks and alloThis move has driven us back to trying cate those to individual cores on your to squeeze every last drop of performance workstation’s processor. This was very out of our workstations. Speed is one of the much on demand and related to the current biggest issues in BIM today and CAD man- view. With this release, ArchiCAD further agers have to spend their time working out enhances its use of multiple cores by constrategies to handle large unwieldy data- stantly using the spare capacity of the sets to keep projects on track. workstation CPU and ‘guessing ahead’, the In general the industry is creaking processing tasks that it ‘thinks’ you are under the combined effect of big data going to do next. While this might sound shoehorned into ‘old’ BIM software. fanciful and indeed a touch too much like Neither the complexity of models nor the snake oil or clairvoyance, it’s actually quite advances of processor architectures were a stroke of genius. originally planned for in the current genObviously, ArchiCAD can’t actually eration of applications and many software predict the future but there have been developers have failed to fully utilise changes to the interface which assists it in multi core processors, instead relying on a getting ahead with the processing worksingle processor core to do most of the load. With 19, Graphisoft has introduced heavy lifting. the concept of tabbed workspaces, which Looking forward, software that does not work in a very similar way to tabs in a utilise multi-cores could actually stagnate web browser, but each tab contains a in terms of performance as the next gener- workspace. This makes it much easier to ation of processors from Intel will have flip between sections, model view, drawmore cores but single threaded perfor- ing view, render or elevations. mance may not increase significantly. The predictive processing uses these as
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clues as to what you will be doing next, As you work in one tab making edits and updating the design, the software will dynamically allocate the update of the model in those tabbed views to spare cores or processing capacity. The net result is that moving from tab to tab, users will find the model ‘instantly’ updated or a long way into performing a task — such as a 3D section. So the software appears significantly more responsive and makes the most of today’s multi-core architectures. Graphisoft explained that in addition to the ‘tabbed clues’ for predictive processing, the new predictive algorithm will do some analysis as to workflow and commonly used tools, to further refine the allocation of processing. To ensure that all this additional ‘front-loaded’ processing doesn’t impact the overall speed of ArchiCAD, the software leaves one core free. By using this unused computer capacity, even if the software anticipates incorrectly, nothing has been lost. www.AECmag.com
14/5/15 10:35:15
