Archicad Speed

[nate-h]

In my office, we all have great PC's with impressive CPU and GPU statistics. However, our Archicad performance is frustratingly slow. When I work from home on my standard M1 Mac Mini, the same teamwork file that was slow on my work PC, is now at least twice as fast on my Mac Mini. Switching between views, panning through views, making model changes, updating views on sheets, etc. are all examples of what is slow on our work PC's but fast on our simpler Mac's. Also, our internet in the office is faster than our internet speed at home.

PC specs:

Intel Core i9-10940X CPU, 14 core, 28 threads @ 3.32 GHz, 64GB RAM

NVIDA GeForce RTX 3080

Mac Mini specs:

Apple M1 chip, 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 8GB RAM

1. Is there some setting within Archicad that is limiting its performance on our PC's?

2. Is Mac a better OS for Archicad?

Operating system used: Windows 11 24H2

[Scott Boyd Turner]

I’d guess that it is your network and server infrastructure that is slowing your office PCs. Sharing files using SMB (the default windows file sharing protocol) is slow, especially if you have roaming profiles, my documents etc as ours much more traffic on the network. Try storing file locally and disconnecting network and see if performance improves.

regards

Scott

[danielk]

I'd say this is less about the performance of your PC and more about the performance of Apple Silicon.

I think the PC hardware seems pretty good on paper, but the Apple Silicon chips are just that much faster. Archicad mostly uses the CPU (so while a good GPU is important, if it is "good enough", it is not going to be the bottle neck), and most calculations are sequential, not parallel, so even though you have 14 cores and 28 threads, Archicad will likely use 1-2 cores for most calculations, so it is more important how fast one core is, rather than how many cores you have. And since Apple Silicon is faster, it will perform better, even with fewer cores.

So, I would say your PCs are probably perform fine, the M1 chip is simply that much better.