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quadro/autocad woes

A

arnemetis

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Hello. Building a budget autocad system for my coworker, and bought this to go in it, the only sanely priced quadro to fit into his $500 or so budget. I'm testing it out tonight, and autocad seems to perform 100% the same...reliant on the cpu. I have gone into options and tried changing the setting for it to render with hardware, but to no avail. The problem remains, even on my system - with a file with many layers and detailed information, when you zoom out and try to pan, everything gets very, VERY choppy. I was hoping the quadro would fix that.
Onto the software. pny bundles a cd with some software on it, of note is the powerdraft software for autocad. I figured this was what I was looking for....yet it tells me there is no nvidia display adapter installed. the documentation doesnt seem to list this adapter as supported, and even the specifications link doesnt list this model...
So what must I do? My end goal here is to have the quadro actually take some of the workload from the cpu, when drafting in 2d autocad. Thank you for any help you may offer.
 
For the video choppiness, see if the box for "Show silhouettes in wireframe" is checked. If it is, uncheck it. All it ever seems to do is slow down video response.

As far as the card goes: I used to work at a place that had bought 1.8GHz Xeon based machines with 1 Gig ram and 64MB Quadro 7 something (64MB) series cards. We worked on AutoCAD and were doing solid models. Out of curiosity, I took a clamping fixture model home that would cause the model to disappear while doing a 3D Orbit. At home, with my machine at the time (XP1800+, Ti4200 128MB, 512MB RAM, WinXP Pro) it would render and orbit without dropping anything. There are options to drop detail or rotate in wireframe, but I have all of those disabled. I'd say that the real difference with the render was the available video memory. Either way, something that cheap with a Quadro name in it is just an overpriced MX400 or something along those lines. You would have been better off with an FX5200 128MB.
 
noise = evil in this new system, I seem to recall the fx series having loud fans:)edit: i see the 5200's use a passive sink...o well, many complain about the garbage quality of the vga port o nthem due to using a ribbon cable. no matter, card is bought...). Show silhouettes in wireframe was unchecked. I agree a quadro for this price was fishy, but i figured since i have to spend a few bux for a gfx card anyway, may as well get a quadro if I can. I dont see how video memory is a problem for the files applicable here, saved in 2000 format they never exceed 11mb. Also, being purely 2d, i didnt expect that much of a bump, but I was hoping it would take just a little of the work from the cpu. O well, thanks for the reply, any others are welcome to comment.
 
What are the rest of the specs of the system?

Just because a file is only 11MB doesn't mean that the file is only going to take up 11MB on the video card. I could make a file under 2MB that could cripple many systems by using blocks. The last place I worked at was working on some 2D files that were about the same size as the ones you were talking about, and they were rough on the ghetto systems we were using. You may want to see if you have all the latest patches installed for AutoCAD too.

Oh, and FX5200 = no fans.
 
rest of the system will be a 3000+ venice on a msi neo2 with a gig of ram, and the quadro. everything is already bought, suggesting other pieces of hardware isnt needed now. even on my system, which i tested it in, a san diego at 2.75ghz, and a gig of tccd, it bogs down at certain things (100% same performance as my 6800gt). the point remains - the video card is doing nothing but spitting back the image created by the processor, ive yet to be able to actually tell autocad to USE the video card to process it, rather than all cpu cycles. THIS is the true problem id like to solve.
 
you might be better off just slaping in a gaming card. i do not know how much the difference in accuracy will be but its gota be faster.

my dad uses a geforce 4 4600 in his autocad box. granted what he is doing does not call for pin point accuracy. (although it is VERY accurate )
 
again, missing the point. i tried it in my system. this quadro, vs my 6800gt (still a good gaming card). Exact same performance as the quadro, because its not making use of the video card for rendering. its quite apparent with task manager open, that the cpu is doing all the work, the video card is just spitting up the image. I know these cards can be told to process the image, not just spit it out from the cpu, so thats what im trying to figure out. perhaps I should post this in another sub-forum?
 
Every system I have ever installed AutoCAD on, I have never had this problem. I would guess that it is a software problem and not the fault of the clapped out Quadro. Although, I did used to have a 3DLabs Oxygen VX-1 32MB that worked well until file sizes got over about 5MB, then it was a slideshow.

My settings are this:

cad.JPG


And this:

cad2.JPG


What version of software are you running?
 
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