Are we using DWGs wrong in Archicad? Severe performance issues with complex machinery files

[st]

I work in the design department of a large construction company specializing in steel industrial buildings, using Archicad as our main design tool.

A recurring challenge we face is incorporating production line machinery into our floor plans. These are typically provided by clients as DWG files, which we usually import directly into Archicad (drag & drop or as external drawings).

However, in many cases, these DWGs are extremely heavy and overly detailed, to the point where they noticeably slow down navigation and general model performance.

What makes this even more frustrating is that cleaning or simplifying these DWG files beforehand is often not a realistic option. They tend to be highly complex, with multiple nested blocks and dense geometry, and in several cases even AutoCAD struggles to handle them efficiently without lag or instability.

So this raises a few questions:

• Is this simply a hardware limitation, or is Archicad not well-suited to handle this type of CAD data?
• Is there a recommended professional workflow for dealing with such files?
• How do larger firms manage this in real-world BIM environments without sacrificing performance?

At the moment, it feels like either we accept degraded performance or we spend unrealistic amounts of time trying to “fix” client DWGs that were never optimized for this use.

I would really appreciate hearing how others deal with this — especially in industrial or highly technical projects.

Operating system used: Windows 11

[Davor P]

There are better and worse ways of adding dwg's. At least you are not adding them as xref.
Maybe try saving out as pmk and add that back in instead of dwg? There is also a way of importing dwg content as object.
File - Interoperability - Merge - Merge from file - Select file and open - Model space into current view - tick the Import model space content as GDL object.
If none of that works, I would turn to Python script to see if there is a way to simplify or decimate - not sure how accurate you need the dwg to be but if it contains millions of very small lines, maybe you can get away with not showing them - python script could remove anything below certain size.