system requirements

[nickolastd21]

Got a question regarding performance of the rhino grasshopper and prc as a whole.
my current set up is i3 4gb ram with hd4000 graphics
this suffers with most simulations and straight up crashes if i try to test for collisions but does work.
but would like a little more real time simulation and bigger tool paths.

planed system replacement is a workstation with:
Intel Xeon X5670 Six Core
24GB DDR3
Nvidia Quadro FX1800

would be grateful for any recommendations or experience with different system spec's
just trying to get a benchmark of whats needed to run prc well.

Thanks All

[Johannes @ Robots in Architecture]

Hello Nickolas,

The collision checking will be much improved in the next member release, probably this weekend, with much less memory consumption.
For other purposes, the PRC calculations are quite fast, but it takes a while for Rhino to display all the lines etc. So a good start is disabling the display of frames, and in general hiding geometry in Grasshopper. That will greatly improve the viewport performance.
There is a dedicated slider for that in the menu - but you can also do it manually.

Regarding your replacement system, I don't believe that Rhino benefits greatly from Quadro cards, so you could easily go for a GeForce as well (unless you are using other software that does).
But I'm assuming that the X5670 system is refurbished or used? I guess for ~250EUR or so for the entire system it would have a good price/performance ratio, but as a 7 year old CPU basically any quad core you can buy today will be faster. The cheapest Ryzen quad core with HT (~4+4 cores) is 150EUR, a B350 mainboard 60EUR, and 16GB RAM 130EUR - the graphic card you could easily buy used.
KUKA|prc uses multithreading for some operations, while Grasshopper itself not so much - that seems to be coming with Rhino 6.

If the bottleneck is the HD4000, you could also buy or borrow a graphics card and see if it makes a difference. Literally any card should be faster than the Intel.

Hope that helps!
Best,
Johannes

[nickolastd21]

Thanks for a fast reply.

no flies on you sir, exactly what i was thinking lol "X5670 system is refurbished or used?"

i actualy have a gtx 770 sitting idle without a system so swapping out a gpu is easy enough.
but if the X5670 would possibly present as the next bottle neck it may pay to get a motherboard with some upgrade potential.

as for the dedicated slider in prc its very good at smoothing things out.

Thanks again Johannes
its i tight ship you run here with the prc software and forum.

[Johannes @ Robots in Architecture]

Hello Nickolas,
Thanks, always happy to help :)
Best,
Johannes