Inside the Factory

How much?

I'm going to get a little philosophical with this post.

 

I recall when I first started working on Revit how it pushed the CPU on my Pentium more than anything I had ever seen before - much more than the CPU would move on our company mail server which I thought was doing quite a bit of work.  Later I taught students my Revit theory on the conservation of work.  The theory posits that the effort of making a set of drawings consistent after... say a floor to floor change does not disappear but instead moves to the processor.  The effort shifts from man to machine.

I also remember having a conversation with one of our developers.  I asked if Moore's law might work in our favor and Revit was just a little bit ahead of the curve and processing capacity would soon catch up.  He confidently assured me that new capacity would be eaten up by new product features and/or changes in what user's model.  He has been right so far, despite several major efforts to enhance performance.

My question to the readers is does this ever stop?  If so when?  Think to the future.  What will you expect to model then and why?  Will it be less or more?   Perhaps model more and annotate less?  What is the projection and can we even discern a logical end?

_erik

Revit and your Graphics Card

A technical post for those who like to know a little more about what is under the hood.

In the 2011 release Revit added some graphics technology called OGS  (One Graphics System).  The name is derived from the use of the technology across multiple products in the company.  This incorporation enabled the realistic view option where bitmap textures are shown in non-rendered views.  I have been asked by a few customers if Revit will cache textures in graphics RAM just like a game system might?  In this situation the amount of RAM on a video card becomes more important when making hardware buying decisions - especially if you spend a lot of time in realistic views. I am happy to say the answer is yes – Revit will fully use this RAM and the graphics team is continually looking to make improvements in memory management.  This means textures will be processed on the board as long as memory on the card is available. When memory is not available the system will start to page and performance will deteriorate.  Having the textures processed on the video card improves performance and the more materials with textures you use the more gain you will see.  Also the more memory the more textures you can have before paging kicks in. I do not have hard performance data to share between cached on HW vs. not cached on HW but am rather confident that hardware with more memory will reduce any chance of paging and therefore aid performance.  Note that textures stored in RAM are raw images so the size when loaded into RAM is often  bigger than the images appear on disk.  How much bigger?   This is hard to say as it varies with the file format.  The “lossier” the compression algorithm the bigger the difference will be between disk and memory.  For example BMP images will have a small ratio while JPG might be big – especially if you lower the quality.

_erik

 

User Performance Roundup

I'm going to revisit a topic that was posted a while back here.

User Performance measures the time it takes you to understand and respond to a machine signal. This often means reducing clicks but can also come in the form of the system conveying information in an easier to digest manner so you can more quickly make a decision toward completing a task.

Below are some areas I have gathered and categorized.  I'd like feedback on this and I hope they spark other thoughts.  Take a look and keep these in mind as you perform some tasks over the next few days.  Are there other minor things you see that if addressed could improve your speed?

CONTROLS

1. Allow clicking on any column header to sort by that header
2. Ensure all lists in dialogs have a meaningful default sorting
3. When names include numbers use a smarter sorting algorithm that accounts for units. (e.g. 1'-0”,1”, 12’, 21”, 4”, 5” - bad,  1”, 4”, 5”, 1'-0”, 21”, 12’ - better
4. Make the offset text input field wider to display larger numbers
5. When moving items up or down in the schedule field order automatically scroll when an item reaches the bottom of the list
6. Display the drop down control so one does not have to first activate the field
7. Ensure the selected value of a drop down is placed at the middle of the list so one can see values above and below without scrolling
8. Increase the length of all drop down lists

NAVIGATION

1. Ensure orient to view on the view cube and steering wheel has scroll bars on the view list
2. Constrain the Zoom drag preview box so its proportioned to the active window aspect ratio to better preview the zoom results
3. Double-click on middle mouse wheel button to perform a zoom extents
4. Double-click on a sheet viewport to activate the viewport
5. Double-click to edit a family
6. Enable middle mouse wheel scrolling in all drop down lists

CLICK THROUGH UI

1. Add <New…> and/or <Load…>  to the drop down where one specifies another family (such as a profile) so the one can continue with their workflow rather than exit the dialog
2. Add a button to the right of the selected family/type that takes you to the properties of that type (to alter, duplicate etc) and then return to the original context when that dialog instance is closed
3. When overriding an object if a Fill or line pattern doesn’t exist, you have to exit, create, and start all over again.  Provide a way to access these UI areas to create new styles that can be used in the overrides dialog. (similar to material parameter)

MATERIAL UI

Ability to delete material

GROUP EDIT MODE

Unable to duplicate a wall type or something else when in group edit mode, except from the project browser.  Allow type duplication in this context.

WORKSHARING

To change the workset of an existing object you have to deselect the object and then reselect it before the workset field on the properties dialog is enabled.  Simplify the steps here.

MASS PLACEMENT

Difficult to place a mass because the mass is work plane based and the placement option is not set to default to the workplane placement option.

More examples?

_Erik

Tuning the Graphics Engine

Hello, My name is Tsvetan Tsvetanov, Principal Software Engineer with AEC Solutions User Experience Team at Autodesk. Until recently I was part of the Graphics Group working on Revit and I would like to shed some light on work that was done to improve graphics performance in the 2010 release.
As in any software development there are requests that lead to creation of new functionality and others that are are considered "renovation." In this release we implemented a few changes that may not be immediately visible. These changes are pretty big and will open doors for possible feature enhancements for our graphics output. Our graphics engine is tightly coupled with our geometry engine. That way, we are able to allow our geometry data to define the behavior or our graphics visualization, for example the color change when you hover or select an element. This makes the graphics engine very flexible and allows us to define states and conditions for when and how something would be processed by the pipeline (the algorithms that determine how things will appear on the screen.) But in the same time it is limited by the fact that such flexibility can comes with a performance cost.

So what did we do this release ?

One of the biggest, yet mostly invisible changes this release was the shift to a new graphics engine that allowed us to support DirectX together with OpenGL. Along with that, we have started to cache our graphics data so we can send it directly to the graphics hardware without a need to pre-calculate it on every single view update. This should lead to better performance depending on the hardware in use. This performance gain might not be immediately noticeable. For example, when the cache is originally created or when there is not enough memory and we start to clean it, there is an initial performance hit. However, subsequent displays of a cached view should be noticeably faster (once again, depending on hardware.)

This development effort was done to create a framework and mechanisms that will allow us to work on future user-requested enhancements for our graphics output and functionality. These improvements are already noticeable in the current release and should improve the speed with which you navigate views in Revit.

Has this been consistent with your experience with the release to date?