Mobile workstations - poor optimalization

[Anonymous]

ArchiCad supposedly supports and recommends Nvidia Quadro and AMD Firepro graphics. However, there doesn't seem to be a consistency in this collaboration with Nvidia/AMD from Graphisoft. Amongst others ;

- The local branch of Graphisoft in Norway recommends gaming-focused graphics cards for ArchiCad.
- In order to use the Nvidia GPU the latest Quadro drivers has to be set to use the dedicated graphics manually in the driver. Unless the performance from "Workstation" laptops like the Lenovo W540, Dell m3800 and HP Zbook15 will be messed up.

My guess is that most of Graphisoft work with mac's and that ArchiCad is becoming a mac-centric software. There is amongst others a archicad-wiki article describing moving from PC to MAC in this way : "Moving from PC to Mac : We are not even assuming anyone is going the other direction… "

A clearly biased expression to the preffered hardware-platform. A little bit stupid when their customers have very diverse needs, and a lot of users would scrap ArchiCad if it was mac only.

I'd like to se a more dedicated focus on hardware for ArchiCad, -collaboration with Nvidia and AMD, and also recommended and certified hardware were we who run the IT-side of things don't have to tweak driver settings or spend weeks investigating what hardware to buy.

[Anonymous]

Johag,
I use both Mac and PC for ArchiCAD and do not find a bias in performance between the two in AC.
AC does not have optimised drivers on PC and should not have to, the drivers from the OS should provide optimum performance for all software. Autodesk have optimised drivers for their products which support a subset of cards and bypass the OS driver system but this will soon be a thing of the past when windows programs will no longer be able to address hardware directly.
Performance gains from extreme graphics cards will be very small in any BIM software as it in the processing of the database to generate the view (2d or 3d) that is the bottleneck.
Scott

[Laszlo Nagy]

Johag,

Are you familiar with the info found in this article?:

http://helpcenter.graphisoft.com/technotes/video-cards/recommended-video-cards-for-archicad-18/