Posted on Thursday, February 01, 2007 10:34 AM
[Editor's Note: After posting a note last night about the reports of terrible performance by CAD software on Windows Vista, I turned to a knowledgeable industry veteran who recently became available to talk freely. When I asked Evan Yares for his view on what's happening, he sent the following reply.]
Microsoft Windows Vista was released for worldwide distribution on January 30. The very next day, reports started popping up about serious performance problems with CAD programs running on Vista. In an article on his WorldCAD Access blog, Ralph Grabowski says “Wow! Vista Runs CAD 80% slower,” pointing to benchmarks published by Tom’s Hardware Guide. Several readers jumped in, speculating about the source of the problem.
Before damning Microsoft for having completely screwed up, it might be worthwhile to consider that neither Microsoft nor the major CAD vendors are run by idiots. I can’t imagine Jim Heppelmann (Chief Product Officer of PTC) standing up in front of a crowd of users, and telling them to use a version of Windows that runs Pro/E 80% slower. (It’s not only because I think Heppelmann is smarter than that, it’s because Pro/E users are probably the toughest crowd in the CAD industry.)
The claim that Vista runs CAD 80% slower simply doesn’t hold up to reasonable scrutiny. Looking at the benchmarks run by Tom’s Hardware, the only one to report such distressing numbers is SPECviewperf 9.03—which relies upon OpenGL. What the authors of the article didn’t explain particularly well is that, out of the box, Vista supports OpenGL as a software layer sitting on top of Direct3D, creating a nasty performance problem. The solution is to use the installable client drivers provided by either NVIDIA or ATI (both of which include high-performance OpenGL support), rather than the “certified” drivers that come with Vista. The authors of the Tom’s Hardware article didn’t do this.
There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about using Vista as a platform for CAD, not the least of which is that it has demanding minimum hardware requirements. Acceptable CAD performance under Vista is going to require new top-of-the-line hardware. Yet, even with the right hardware, CAD performance under Vista is going to remain an open question for a while longer. Microsoft pushed hard to get Vista shipped, but important components, such as display drivers and development tools, are still buggy and incomplete. It will likely be many months before these problems will be shaken out.
Guest writer Evan Yares is the former executive director of the Open Design Alliance and, before that, a CAD industry analyst.