Is Archicad really suitable for medium-scale landscape projects?

[GrudenJ]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to hear some honest opinions from people who are using Archicad for landscape projects.

I’m currently working on a project that covers a fairly large area. I imported a geodetic survey plan with 1 m contour lines. It’s detailed, yes, but nothing unusual for landscape architecture. The problem is that the file becomes extremely laggy as soon as the contours are visible. Zooming and panning slow down a lot, and rebuilding views takes far longer than it should.

I’ve already adjusted my settings to favor performance as much as possible, and I’m running this on a very high-end machine (i9-14900K, RTX 4090, 128 GB RAM), so hardware really shouldn’t be the issue. I can make it somewhat manageable by constantly turning layers on and off and being very careful with what’s visible, but it’s still far from comfortable to work in.

What really makes me question things is that the exact same survey drawing runs perfectly smoothly in AutoCAD.

So now I’m wondering: is this just how Archicad handles complex 2D vector data? Is there a better workflow for dealing with detailed contour information? Or is Archicad simply not the best primary tool for larger-scale landscape projects?

I’d really appreciate hearing how others deal with this kind of situation.

Edit: As seen in task manager, the CPU usage doesnt go above 10 %, and cpu usage doesnt go above 20, when panning and zooming around (when everything is very very laggy).

Operating system used: Windows Windows 11 Pro 26100

[Barry Kelly]

The contours are made up of hundreds if not thousands of tiny line segments.

Archicad does not like that.

There is a Line Consolidation tool in Archicad, that can merge overlapping lines and convert continuous single lines (ends touching) into a single polyline.

I have never tried it with such a detailed survey though.

Barry.

[Lingwisyer]

From memory, this is due to the lack of parallisation in AC. Until recently, AC was purely reliant on single core performance, with it now being able to use other cores for background tasks.

[Pavel_N]

I just looked at the CPU usage in AC29, tested on Win NTB (i5 - 11300H 4/8 cores):

/Rebuilding 3d vector documents - up to 80% at peak. This seems like an improvement over the past, which I think is great. It is a fact that the AC29 seems to me to be faster than the AC28 for this task. Is it just a feeling, or do you have similar experiences? Most likely an operation optimized for multiple cores..

/Starting Archicad and loading the file, converting a large DWG with a cadastral map - about 20% on average, 30% at peak

/Zooming a complex dwg, marking thousands of lines - about 20% on average, 30% at peak

I don't understand the design of processors at all, but maybe those 20% will correspond to processes that are running completely beyond single-core performance (I have 100% / 4 cores = 25% +-)?

[Lingwisyer]

Depends on how it represents boost speeds, since that is basically increasing the speed of a single core at the cost of the other cores from my understanding. ie. A single core becomes more that it's relevant fraction. No clue how hyperthreading works into this.

I do not really use 3D documents so I cannot really say... The engine used to draw 3D documents is probably different to the one used to draw 2D documents, hence the different utilisations.

[Pavel_N]

The usage meter in Win says that one core is not running at full power, but that all cores are running at about 1/4 power. But that could just be a software appereance.

Some CAD programs declare that they can use a multi-core processor for working with 2D drawings (Briscad, GstarCAD). Are there any users here who own such a program? I would be interested in a comparison with AC in terms of core usage.