Is 20,000,000 Polygons Too Much? PIMP MY MAC!!!

[matthewjj]

I need advice from people who understand hardware. Our IT department hasn't been able to figure out what kind of configuration to put on our standard Mac Pros or Power User Mac Pros.

Here is our typical project type:
20+ Story Buildings
500,000 SF

20,000,000 Polygon Count
200-400 MB Master Model File

100-200 Layout Sheets
100-200 MB Layout File

Current Standard Config:
Processor- Mac Pro 2x2 Dual-Core Xeon
RAM- 2 GB DDR2
Graphics Card- NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT w/256 vram
L2 Cache - 4 MB

Current Pro Config:
Processor- Mac Pro 2x2 Dual-Core Xeon
RAM- 4 GB DDR2
Graphics Card- NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT w/256 vram
L2 Cache - 4 MB

2D redraws are ok but Copy+Paste can take 10 seconds @ times (often even for very small 2D items).
We have noticable drag in 3D in OpenGL with our current setups.
All project are stored and worked on over a server.

We can't tell which of the following Mac Pro components (RAM, Processor Speed or Graphics Card) is the best to upgrade for optimum performance on projects like these. Also, when you have 2x4 Core processors (8 cores total) how is memory used/allocated by Archicad?

[Dwight]

I'm having the new 2.8 mac pro with the 512 video card. and 16 gigamegz RAM.

Mac RAM allocation is dynamic except for Photoshop where you can assign a maximum percentage.

I've never had Archicad go over 2Gb Ram use when rendering.

I find a 512 video card much faster with the OpenGL 3D than a 256 that was jerky at times.

The copy/paste thing is a problem i had occasionally in the past but the new machine flows. But you have huge files.

I suspect that you might have ethernet priority issues. Where are your temporary files? I believe that each machine should keep its temps locally???

[henrypootel]

Processor speed wise, you won't be able to get much better than you already have, but the Video Card is atrocious. Definetely why your 3D is slow. It's the bottom end of an old line. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that the amount of RAM on a graphics card is how fast it is. the speed of the card is determined by the chip that is in the card. RAM amount it a very distant second place in this concern.
For maximum speed at a good price, get GeForce 8600s.

[TomWaltz]

Have you read Graphisoft's "Big Building White Paper"?

20 million polygons and 400 MB is too much for Archicad to have in one file. With 2008 hardware, you're not going to see good performance on that file.

Using methods similar to GS' recommendations, we have a one million SF building that's only got about 4 million polygons and an 80 MB file (though there are several of them)