Advanced Users' Computer Specs

[Josh Verran]

I hope this is a suitable place to ask this query.

I'm curious to gather some community insights on Archicad performance. I often find myself wondering how our hardware stacks up, especially when task efficiency seems to vary, even in what I presume are high-spec environments.

I’d really like to know:

1. What kind of specs are you running on, especially for those of you tackling high-end projects?
2. What's your general performance experience with Archicad, even on what you'd consider a high-spec setup?

Keen to get your perspectives. Cheers!

[Nathan Hildebrandt]

Hi @Josh Verran,

I suggest that this isn't the right forum for this question. I would suggest this is best posted in the broader Community. Can you please confirm that you are happy for me to shift this post into the general Community.

Thanks 

Nathan

[scottjm]

This is what we are running across most of our high power Archicad users, they are about 3 years old now, but are still running pretty well.

The biggest performance issue we have found is with 2D redraw on very big hospital projects.  Opening up a new 2D floorplan view it can take anywhere from 30second to a couple of minutes to open up the view, and if you are jumping between layouts and different floor plans views it is unbelievably painful.  My understanding the bottleneck is caused by 2D redraw only being single core, until 3D processing which is mutli-core.

Dell Precision 3630

CPU: i9-9900K

RAM: 32GB DDR4

GPX: Quadro P2200

HDD: 500GB NVMe SSD

OS: Win 10

We are looking into purchasing some newer machines soon though with 13th Gen i9-13900K, 32gb DDR5 and Geforce RTX3070.  We've made the decision to ditch the workstation graphics cards and go for gaming cards in the future, the bang for buck is so much better for the gaming cards and we do a lot of realtime rendering in enscape which is better suited to gaming cards.  From my understanding the gaming card error detection is on par with the workstation cards these days, and we've not experienced any issues on some of the machines we've tested gaming cards on.

[Erik Bjornhage]

We actually have all our staff using laptops.

This was of course helpful during the pandemic and it is a measured decision considering you are trading performance for flexibility.

Our normal machines have the following setup:

Dell Precision 5570

CPU: i7-12700H

RAM: 32GB DDR5 (a select few users are running 64GB)

GPU: RTX A2000 8GB

HDD: 1TB NVMe SSD

OS: Win 11 Pro (currently 23H2)

There are a few times we have suffered in larger projects (we do mainly multistorey residential) but most of those times the problem is not the machines.

We have however found issues with the graphics driver when viewing the 3D model which means that we are constantly having to roll back to an older driver  which seem to work better.

Our visualisation team have the same setup (with 64GB RAM) and most of their work is done through remote deskptop of a stationary Monster-machine.

We normally upgrade users on a three year cycle with half the office in Q3-4 and the second half in Q1-2 the following year.

[Josh Verran]

Hi @Nathan Hildebrandt 

Yeah absolutely, go ahead and shift.

Thanks.

[Romans]

I can only speak for the Mac world of Archicad...

Things are really slowing down when you use BIMcloud / Teamwork. Loading times, reservation, synchronization, etc, are all really damn slow, even in a wired 10 Gbit LAN environment.
And Sections / Elevations are absolutely terrible. Please take care and avoid turning on multiple 3D objects, especially vegetation (trees). This will take ages.
But the most worrying thing is that the performance of Archicad is not changing much with newer, more powerful hardware. At least not in line with the steep price jumps in the Apple world.

We use old hardware like 27-inch iMacs from 2014, a MacPro (2013) as well iMacPros from 2017 with max specs. for CPU and GPU. There is not so much a difference. RAM is 64 GB, quite reasonable.

The new ARM (Apple Silicon) with the Archicad ARM version speeds things up, but not in the way that we want to substitute all of our Intel Macs soon.

Sobering...

[4dProof]

I have the joy, privilege, torment, and agony of working with about a dozen different firms on a wide range of hardware and OS configurations.
My main client is running M1/M2 macbook pros, with 64GB RAM and about 1TB storage. These are probably the highest end projects anyone could imagine. Their BIM Server (running bimcloudbasic) is a purpose built windows server. Because of the nature of their projects, security needs, data integrity, and network and outside connection demands (VPN bottlenecks to name one), the server is probably about 10,000x the GS recommendation.
They have no operating issues, outside the usual and regular crashes, t/w errors, local data corruptions, etc. etc. etc. The performance is amazing; however they do utilize a separate work station for twinmotion rendering, as it requires an eGPU to process their renderings and post production demands, and mac just isn't up for the challenge.
I work with another firm that definitely hits the "high end" qualifier; but their average file size on the BIM server is only about 10% as robust. They go between mac and pc, depending on users preference, but none runs less than 32GB RAM, and everyone has better than min. required graphics cards. They are also on a BIMcloud basic, but have fewer data glitches, crashes, and corruptions; largely, IMO, tied to the smaller cache exchanges. They also work between office, work from home, and remote office conditions over a VPN.
As a third example, I'll give myself up for the sake of... whatever... I have 3 macs, none newer than 4 years, all running intel, not m1/m2. All have 32gb or higher RAM. I have a minimum of 2 crashes per day. Because my work-horse iMac is a bit on the old side, and because my local data caches are probably more overloaded than most people could imagine, I suppose it should be expected. As far as performance, I do not notice s/r or other t/w operations to be any more a drag than on even the highest end computers. It's just that operations and basic functionality can trigger a crash at any time. 
Because of this, I am planning on, by Q4 of this year, to invest in a M2 MBP with at least 4TB storage, possibly bump it to 8TB; hoping that this will alleviate my overloaded caches and short memory notifications.