6990m CAD Performance

Figured I should post this here in case someone else had the same problem (and probably solved it).

I am a moderate CAD user and decided to go with a mobile consumer card mainly because mobile workstation graphics are a little too expensive for me. I also had previous experiences with consumer cards (when doing CAD work and rendering) and I don't consider them all that bad compared to their super blazing fast professional counterparts. I also figured that a high end consumer card will handle CAD fairly well.

Ok. So I fired up Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011 and I got a message: "Your video card is not supported... please contact product support". I went on and started rendering one interior perspective view. Everything went ok. The renderer started.

Now, I know the 6990m is not an OpenGL optimized card, but the render doesn't seem any faster than my previous mobile video card, the Mobility HD3650. Checked Autodesk Video Card Support page and from the video card category drop down list I noticed: Consumer, Mobile and Workstation.

For some reason I found that the 6970m was listed under the Workstation category, but found no 6990m.

Then I thought, maybe the dedicated video card doesn't work at all and maybe the CPU (2630QM) is the one that is rendering everything with the Intel HD 3000. As I said before, rendering speed wasn't greater than my previous Mobility HD 3650. I did a quick bench search on both cards and found out surprisingly similar results (with some specific variations, of course).

At this point I opened the task manager and HWiNFO. The task manager displayed 100% usage on the CPU on all cores. Checked with HWiNFO and saw that the CPU temps were ranging between 66C and 71C. Then I scrolled down a bit to look at the GPU and (as I suspected) found temps were close to Idle - 37C - 43C.

The GPU fan was obviously at 22RPM and was barely audible (right fan) compared to the CPU fan which was pretty loud (left side). I have a P170HM.

Any ideas how I could get the dedicated GPU to work? The Mobility HD3650 had no problems with Autodesk's hardware support and it is starting to get pretty old and it is pretty hard to believe that I can't make use of a newer dedicated card just because Autodesk doesn't have a certification "stamp" on it.
The 6990m is a one month old video card and the drivers (have the latest installed) are in their infancy, so I figured this might be the reason.

Anyone have any suggestions? I would very much appreciate your help.

 

Actually, I think you might be confusing some things.
If I'm not mistaken, CAD doesn't support GPU rendering, rather it's all CPU bound.
The GPU's are used (for now) to render the Viewports, but that's it.

3d Studio Max for example started supporting GPU accelerated rendering with "iRay" and "QuickSilver" renderer which became integrated into it from 2011 version (at least QuickSilver was, but I hadn't opened Max in a few months so I hadn't noticed iRay), but it's only functional on Nvidia cards that have CUDA.
While AMD cards have a CUDA equivalent, Autodesk didn't optimize it's products to use it (at least as far as I know).

One thing I cannot be sure about though is whether Autodesk integrated GPU rendering into CAD... but I don't think they have.

Either way, professional GPU's in software such as CAD or Max were predominantly used to speed up view-port preview FPS, mainly because they were optimized for OpenGL, but one thing they don't want people to know or get worked up about is that consumer gpu's and professional gpu's are essentially same gpu's with equal/comparable power which were merely optimized for different functions via drivers for the most part (but they started to integrate things on a hardware level to prevent people from soft-modding their cards into professional ones for CAD based programs).
The only difference between consumer and professional cards is that the latter are more expensive because the names are different and optimized for different tasks (which doesn't justify the costs in question).

 

I am aware that Revit is more CPU heavy than GPU, but if we were to discuss viewport rendering, I am still not sure which GPU is the one working here. There should be a difference.

Any suggestions on which software I should port CAD models to make the most out of the video card? (in case I can't make it work in Revit?)

Although this might be a bit off, but I made a comparison between render times (same scene) on two different mobile systems: an older AMD ZM-80 CPU (Mobility HD3650) vs. an Intel i5 430M (Mobility HD5470). The result was 23 hours vs. 4 hours. Whether it was the CPU or the GPU, I'm not sure, but I do know that the difference between those two CPU's is greater than between the GPU's.

I never understood the cost justification myself. I knew they were downclocked and bios modded chips with special drivers though. Any ideas I could soft-mod my card to trick Revit into thinking it is a M8900? As far as I know, the M8900 is a 6970m and there is not that much difference between a 6970m and 6990m. Any ideas?

 

Regarding Revit... it's entirely possible your HD3000 was in use instead of the dedicated card.
The 6990M is a very new gpu, so it's possible the devs of CAD didn't release proper support for it (hence why you haven't noticed viewport rendering speed increase because it might be using the Intel card).
Have you installed the latest AMD drivers though?
That might solve your problems.
If it doesn't, then it's possible that switching between the gpu's is not working properly (which wouldn't surprise me one bit since the tech has not yet been perfected).

According to PassMark benchmarks, the difference between your older AMD ZM-80 and i5 is by 1000 points (or roughly 60%).
So that should have translated to roughly 9.5 hours for your i5 system.
Then again, the i5 series has certain other features that could have been used by AutoCad, or Autocad's certain functions that speed up rendering even further were working a lot better on your new system for a variety of reasons (the gpu though was probably NOT one of them).
Had your gpu been in use, the render times would not have been measured in hours, but rather seconds (gpu rendering shows an increase of about 10 to 20x over cpu based rendering) - or the program could have used the gpu to render a very small portion of the scene (certain renders while being mostly CPU based can use the gpu in a VERY limited amount to speed up render times).

As for model porting to a program where you could make the most of your gpu...
That depends on several factors:
Whether the software supports GPU accelerated rendering (most do not) and if the GPU you have is supported in a said software to be used in rendering images (and not just viewports) - those programs that do have gpu renders integrated into them are mostly optimized for Nvidia CUDA... predominantly due to Nvidia 'It's meant to be played' garbage, hence why AMD cards would go underutilized.

If it's all the same to you though, try using google to see which CAD based software uses GPU rendering and whether or not AMD cards are supported.

And finally in regards to the costs... that's capitalism for you.
If the world functioned in a manner that the people get what is technologically newest ... I can tell you that laptops would be decades ahead of what we currently have.
The technology to do so has been invented, but never put out into circulation.
Why?
Profits.
It's far more profitable to milk consumers for every penny for a decade or more and introduce minor technological developments while at the same time saying they are 'major breakthroughs'.
SSD's have been in the market for some time now, and their prices are still insanely huge for the offered capacities.
Meanwhile, manufacturers try justifying the 'costs' saying it's the manuf. process and materials.
they aren't shipping them from the moon or space in general. They are probably even recycling old technology into base elements (raw matter) and just reconstitute them into new materials (and if not, they are morons, because people could have used this decades ago to clean the planet up for one thing and not even touch 'new resources' some time to come).
Anyway...

I think people tried to soft-mod new gpu's into professional cards but have been met with failure because of the hardware changes the manufacturers did to prevent this sort of tampering.

 

Yes. The latest drivers are installed. Let's hope they will up the ante a bit when the new drivers come out, be it CAD friendly or not.
In the meantime, I'll try to find some CAD that can fully make use of the GPU as well as softmods.

I am also well aware concerning consumer "extortion" in a controlled market.
That is why I didn't quite jump head on into buying an SSD yet. The market may be immature, but there haven't been significant price drops as you would see with other products.

I'll keep this post updated if there is any progress.

 

this is one of the reasons i stick to nvidia. although amd has cuda equivalents, etc, nvidia is just supported much more on proffesional and enterprise level software.

i am no nvidia fanboy, and i do like amd for its price point and technology, but until i see more support ( i do video editing), i will have to stay with nvidia.

please do update us if you find anything useful.

 

Indeed.
I have to stick with Nvidia as well because I use 3dsMax, and I would prefer to be able to use the power in my gpu for rendering instead of just the cpu.
I'm hardly an Nvidia fanboy myself (in fact I LOATHE them for putting premium price tag on a CUDA), and I LOVE AMD's offerings for the much lower price tag and seeing how they are comparable if not better than Nvidia, but I agree that until more support arrives for AMD cards in terms of using them for rendering images and animations via GPU, unfortunately, I can't make the switch.

 

Ok... I don't know too much about this topics... but as far as I know, the cpu makes renders and the gpu makes more fps in the program... makes it smoother... some one talked about this...
http://forum.notebookreview.com/wha...gt425m-vs-i7-2630qm-gt555m-cad-3d-render.html
so, a better cpu, makes renders faster, not the gpu... personally, I use keyshot 2 to make renders...
Personal question... do u use maya o rhino? do those programs run well in your machine?

 

I use Revit. As far as I know, Revit uses a renderer similar, if not completely based on 3ds Max.

 

I don't know much about CAD enviroments but for blender there is a GPU accelerated renderer. It's still in development but I would be surprised if there weren't any plugins available for CAD which allowed you to render on your GPU.

 

I'm still unsure whether I should flash my 6990m to a M8900. I know for a fact that guys around here managed to flash a 6970m successfully.

Should I try and flash the card or should I buy a stock 6970m, flash it to M8900 and play the swapping game? I chickened out when I heard that you can brick it entirely. The 6990m is based on a desktop 6870 while the 6970m is a 6850. Does it matter?

 

The possibility of bricking the gpu exists... usually if you mess something up (although lack of support or an improper ROM, and a ton of other factors can come into play as well).
I think you can do a blind flash to restore the gpu back to the original though.

do your research and then make a decision.

 

In 3D applications:
GPU shows the viewport nothing more*.
CPU makes the rendering. *except if there is CUDA or OPENCL(note OPEN CL not OPEN GL) rendering.

There is no reason to flash your card. It is perfectly fine and most probably doing what it should: showing the viewport.

If you doubt it is not working download Cinebench 11.5 no need to install, run the Open GL(note Open GL not Open CL this time) test.

MAXON: CINEBENCH

check some scores here Maxon Cinebench 11.5 Score Results