Vista renders bad news for CAD applications
1 min read
Microsoft’s Vista is not such good news for some CAD users: systems under test run up to 50 times slower.
That’s according to Ralph Grabowski’s popular CAD newsletter UpFront ezine, which reports the popular benchmarking site running the SPECviewperf 9.03 benchmarks on several CAD systems, and finding that “they slow to a crawl under Vista.”
Comparisons against the Microsoft XP operating system show Pro/Engineer running 6.7times slower, SolidWorks running 9.0 times slower, TeamCenter 9.1times slower and UGS NX running a full 50 times slower.
Evidently the reason is Vista's lack of support for the industry standard OpenGL graphics library, which 3D CAD software relies on for producing real-time graphics for realistically rendered models.
Vista uses Microsoft's own Direct3D graphics accelerator instead, meaning that OpenGL-based applications have to run through an emulation layer – and that’s what slows the performance.
Grabowski predicts that the problems will be ameliorated fairly quickly “as the next generation of graphics cards and drivers are released,” but adds that variations in quality of cards “will continue to be the reality for anyone with pre-Vista graphics cards.”
The prediction: Direct3D will win the CAD market in the future for two reasons. First, the games market is huge, so device drivers will be optimised for Vista. Second; Direct3D needs to be fast to run the operating system.
