SW2006 Pre Release is now available.

Just saw the posting on the SW website.

The cat is now out of the bag. Gentleman start your benchmarks.

http://www.engtran.com/SWBM001.html

 

Paul,

I don't know about you, but as far as I'm concerned. "an exponential
increase in performance" is a very strong statement, but not very credible.
Kinda like saying you won a gazillion dollars. How much is the "exactly"

According to one guy on the SW hosted group, feature creation, rebuilding,
etc. (all the things that really matter) are the typical 10-15% slower than
2005. It'll be interesting to seperate the truth from the marketing spin

Mark

 

I made a comment previously about the term exponential. It takes at
least three points to determine an exponential curve. It is kind of
like the Ronco Rotisserie. If you watch the infomercial the phrase,
"Just Set It and Forget It" is repeated over and over again. When the
unit arrives it has a big yellow sticker on the front saying, "Don't
take Set it and Forget it Literally". Since SW has traditionaly had
about a 4-5% decrease in performance per release the best they could
say is that they stopped the exponential decrease they had been seeing.
Their will probably be a statement in the EULA saying, "Don't take
exponential increase in performance literally."

If you can't measure it, is it really there?

 

I'd settle for an "exponential" decrease in crashes. Particularly
during file save, you know, the thing your supposed to be able to do to
make you feel warm, fuzzy, and safe.......

I used to think '04 (been a user since '99) was the worst release ever
(stability wise), then '05 came along and I said "let's use it, it
can't be any worse".... then it proceeded to crap all over me. If '06
continues the trend, I think I'm done with it, the search for an
alternative will start in earnest. I'm already having a look at Visi
next week.

I really hope that '06 is an improvement, but after some of the stupid
things I've seen get broke in the last two releases, I'm bracing for
another disappointment.

Rory

Tool & Die for Automotive stampings
Some Molds
Check Fixtures

 

We are looking at Catia v5 soon as well, I know its the same company,
Dassault, but they have 5 times as many developement engineers working on it
than Solidworks has. Maybe thats why they can listen and implement customer
requests.We have had a request to implement a particular sheet metal
function for aerospace since v2002, looks like v2006 still doesnt have it.

 

We went to the roll-out yesterday. As best as I could tell from the
presentation, the major part of the "increase in performance" is that
they've made lightweight a lot more useful. When the machine doesn't have to
resolve a part, it's much quicker. They've also implemented background
processes, so that you can keep dropping draft quality views on while it
calculates the high quality views, for example. This could be a big deal as
more processing can be moved on to other processors or other cores in a
given processor.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

Drawing performance is a big deal and needed to be addressed,
especially for large assemblies. I have assemblies that have to be
worked on in high quality mode just to see the lines. So I would still
have to wait it out.

 

Paul,

bench times

Ship in a bottle
2003 28.5
2004 30.25
2005 32.25
2006 31.4

Star 2.1
2003 36.0
2004 39.65
2005 43.7
2006 45.3

Patbench
2005 6.625 for 8
2006 6.625 for 8

Not as bad as I feared. The Star 2.1 might be the result of percieved
sluggishness in the 2006 sketcher. This may be better (or worse) on SP0.

The 2006 Ship times are probably partially the result of optimized and
re-coded graphics.

It looks like they may have, at least, stopped their downward slide.

I went to a Solidworks roll out this morning at the Anahiem convention
center. It was hosted by Go-Engineer. The guest speaker was Chris Garcia VP
of R&D at SW. He outlined his plan to overhaul SW with regards to
performance an quality. There were a total of 25 major functional areas
scheduled for optimization. 10 of them made it into 2006 first release, and
deal largely with assembly and drawing performance. I have to say, the on
screen real time demo "looked" impressive.

The most encouraging thing was that this guy "appeard" to have a plan, and
it made sense to "me".

Regards

Mark

 

I appreciate it. It is no small thing to run a benchmark on four
releases.

The word exponential doesn't quite pop out of the numbers.

If you look at these in a practical light, Ship in a Bottle and STAR
give some sense of where rebuild times are going for parts. STAR
especially is as free of graphics and user interface effects as
possible. Probably not a big deal for most unless involved in the mold
side where part rebuild times can be a big problem.

But Patbench effects a lot of people who will want to use patterns more
often and they will still run into that wall. It seems to me two walls
need to be surmounted with Patbench performance. First, the rate at
which the times climb IS exponential with the number of levels. This of
course means there will always be a limit. Second, Patbench will run SW
out of memory at a high enough setting. This is another big wall both
from the standpoint of making parts that can be opened on any system
and on speed because when a single part feature can consume all a
system's free RAM there is a serious limit.

It is nice that Mr. Garcia has a plan but it still looks like the tough
stuff is being avoided for now. Just the term optimzation is a tipoff.
You can optimize a Model T all you want and it still won't manage to
pass an F1 car with the engine idling. SW really needs to get into
some cutting edge stuff when it comes to performance and they had a
start with Cosmic Blobs.

Let's face it. 3D CAD has got to be one of the most demanding tasks in
the history of computing because ultimately more and more will be
modeled at a single time. SRAC made a breakthrough 10 years ago with
their FFE solver and it revolutionized FEA. SW revolutionized a clunky
Pro/E interface about the same time. But precious little has seemed to
happen in the CAD world since then except for and exponential increase
in hype and a steady decrease in the truly revolutionary. SW doesn't
even seem to be able to borrow from their parent company the technology
that allowed an entire 777 to be modeled at once.

 

I try today with an average assembly with 2000 components. I open it in
Lightweight, place the views. Placing views run pretty fast. In less
then 10 sec, I can place 4 views. It displays first in draft quality
while it's still computing the high quality. I can see in the Task
Manager that my system is running at 100%. It still let me moving views
around. After about 2 minutes, all the views start showing all details
in high quality.

 

Paul,

The only way to increase SW performance "IS" to optimize. Many times this
can, and often does, result in the complete rewrite of components. Starting
over is about as radical as it gets. If making your code more efficient
isn't the answer, than what is ?? How would you do it Paul ?? Give up and
walk away ?????

I'm not taking their side in this, they still have alot to prove. This
Garcia guy was all nuts and bolts. No fanfare or wiscracks or buzzword BS.
That's the reason I paid attention to him, but I'm in the show-me mode.

Mark

 

"Kman" <> a écrit dans le message de
SW just

On the other side, they are not going to say that their next release is a
dog. At leas they keep trying.
My solution is: drop subscription, stick with a release you like, and
upgrade software and hardware simultaneously to compensate.

"what Andy gives me, Bill takes" (or something close)

 

Mark,

If you review the What's New Guide for 2006, the performance improvements
were specifically targeted towards drawings and assemblies. In these areas,
performance is dramatically improved.

For example, many assembly operations that previously required components to
be resolved have been eliminated. These include mating, component
insertion, interference detection and section view creation. Lightweight
drawings now support the creation of section views, adding annotations and
ballooning, without resolving components.

While I agree, work still needs to be done, these improvements are
significant.

CG

 

From what was explained in the launch demo, all it was supposed to do
was speed up the initial placing/moving/detailing of views. If you
want high quality prints you will have to wait until it's fully loaded.
It speeds up the initial part of making the drawing.

The demo I saw had a 6800 piece assembly of which the AE created 4
views and was dimensioning in around a minute. To me, that was leaps
and bounds over where it has been over the last couple of years. He
also inserted another instance of that assembly in a top level assembly
(13600 parts) and was moving the sub assemblies around very smooth.

I'm hopeful, that's all I can say.

Later

 

I don't know if I would call all this lightweight stuff optimizing. Are
they going to optimize like gamers optimize and code inner loops in
machine language and access the hardware directly. I doubt it. I don't
disagree optimizing will increase performance but you have to put it in
perspective. First ask the question where does performance have to be
to get the job done? We are creating proposals in Fast Cad because SW
can't put a proposal layout together in a timely fashion. That is true
lightweight. Dump the 3D model until it is really useful. If
optimizing won't provide the performance necessary then what? The code
will be faster, but not fast enough. So how do you know what fast
enough is? That is what the real focus should be on. It gets rid of the
smoke and mirrors approach of judging one years speed increases on last
years losses. If Garcia is really as nuts and bolts as you say, he
should agree to this. We have to find measures of performance that can
be relied on to reflect what we experience and we have to get SW to
agree to meet certain measurable goals.

I'm not going to try and answer the how to do it part of your response.
I know just a little bit about how SW works and how CAD works. I have
to really struggle to write the simplest code. But there are those who
do know these things. I mentioned Cosmic Blobs because SW is looking
at alternatives that are radical departures from what they are now
doing. All we can do as users is to determine how fast is fast enough
and measure what we are given by that measure.

 

Paul,

You can't access the hardware directly in Windows. Every thing gets
abstracted through the HAL


I doubt it. I don't

In this case it sounds like your using a screwdriver for a hammer.

Ya gotta start somewhere don't ya ??? Just the fact that we didn't lose much
is a start.
We'll have to see if it's an accident or part of the plan won't we. They
still have time to screw it up before SP0.

In any event, we're limited to the maximum speed of Parasolid to solve
things. I've seen UG solve complex parts much faster than SW. There are a
whole shitload of possible variables, not the least of which is hardware.

I agree that a common metric should be used. Most benchmarks are for
hardware, and are intended more to muddy the waters than to prove anything

I'm no progammer either, but I recognised some of the techniques he talked
about from my UNIX days. They were the types of things that allowed you to
design a whole aircraft on a 60mhz UNIX RISC box.

Solidworks is a very "serialzed" program. Not only in the data structure,
but also in the way it functions. This is one of the reasons we watch the
hourglass so much. Everything it does is a bottleneck for the next thing.
It's a matter of architecture, it doesn't have to be that way.

So, besides being argumentative (which is out of character for you), what's
your point ??


Regards

Mark