Hide Plot Limitation?

There seems to be a limitation in AutoCAD with how big of a 3D model you can plot hidden.

Basically, if a plot is too large, AutoCAD will crash during the plot process right before the part where it says "Hiding Lines". AutoCAD will just vanish and the Windows desktop will be staring you in the face. The AutoCAD error reporting window doesn't even come up. It is 100% repeatable and extremely consistent, even among different machines.

You can duplicate this yourself by just drawing a cylinder in a blank drawing, then arraying and copying it until you have several tens of thousands of cylinders in the drawing. Then, do a sort of isometric view plot extents. My setup works with 40,000 cylinders, then crashes at 50,000 cylinders.

Not hiding the plot works fine.

My rig isn't even close to running out of memory or anything when it crashes. AutoCAD 2004, Windows 2000, 2 Gig RAM, 3.4 ghz P4, nVidia Quadro FX 3000 video card, plenty of virtual memory.

There are some factors I have found that affect how big the limit is, but won't get rid of it. FACETRES (rendered object smoothness) can increase your cap when set low, at the expense of squaring off round edges. Orthographic views typically get further. Paper size of the plot. Small paper sizes get further. Some Pre-2004 versions of AutoCAD seem to be able to get a bit further too. Turning off HIDEPRECISION gets further too, but then the plot is usually missing important lines.

So, you might say, "Well, who cares about plotting 50,000 cylinders? That's crazy." Well, I don't care either. But, my company makes oil & gas refining equipment. Particularly, we commonly design entire plants for natural gas processing. We essentially have field drawings that are essentially an entire gas plant in a single drawing file (largely xrefs). Some of these easily surpass that limit. Setting FACETRES as low is it can even go doesn't even work. It's a huge problem for us. Some smart guys at Coade (provider of our piping software) and our CAD dealer haven't been able to resolve the problem for us. We really need to be able to plot these big drawings, and AutoCAD should be able to plot it correctly, even if it takes the machine a long time to do it.

Does anyone know anything about this or have any ideas?

Thanks,
John Galazin
Pipe Designer
The Hanover Co.