Archicad 11 versus My PC

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I’m a student using Archicad 11 on Windows XP SP2 and I have many problems with 3D. To zoom and to rotate the buildings is extremely slow; the same the rendering. Even to open a project takes a lot of time…

I use DirectX 9.0c and the driver for video card seems to be okay, I recently downloaded it from NVIDIA. I have to mention that I have a 24” monitor and the resolution is 1920 x 1200 (32bits).

I replaced the 512 MB system memory with 2GB and still no improvement. I even went to an IT shop with my computer and I tested another video card having 512MB RAM and I saw just a little improvement, but far away from a normal behavior.

My system is:

AMD Athlon 2.3 GHz
Asus A7N8X-E
2 x 1GB (dual channel)
Leadtek GeForce4 MX 4000 - 128MB RAM

Please let me know if I can check something else, if I can tune somehow the settings in order to save ~ 1000 $ for a new machine! (

Thank you.

[Anonymous]

The 3d window is powered purely by the graphics card, so I would suggest that the graphics card is the weakest part of your system. This will have no effect on rendering speed though. It is a slow process anyway, limited by the processor speed and number of cores.

You say you tried a 512Mb card instead? Do you remember which model, as the amount of card memory doesn't necessarily translate into speed.

Any up-to-date middle-of-the-range gaming graphics card will be more than powerful enough for AC. Have a look on any computer hardware review sites and see what's available. Try tomshardware, for example.

[Anonymous]

I do believe in miracles now!

I downloaded a new driver from NVIDIA (93.71_forceware_winxp2k_english_whql) and everything works fine! Computer's world is very very strange...

Thanks God for inspiration, otherwise I was decided to spend those 1000$ on a Core 2 Duo & Co.

[Richard Morrison]

Glad you got this fixed. Remember that you can always use the marquee to outline a much smaller part of the building for the 3D view, which will render and navigate much faster.