How about some help for your customers.

 _{(After a number of requests, I changed the Title to better reflect the issue)}

We are in the process of purchasing new workstations for this fiscal year. We are on a 5 year cycle and end up purchasing 125+ CAD workstations every year. Usually by the end of the 5 years, the machines seem to be dragging and the new ones scream. The trouble we are starting to see and need some help with is in regards to video cards.

As we made the move to XM and as we are looking forward to the move to Athens, several issues have showed up. First, machines that ran 8.5 with good performance are visibly slower in XM. Some we can attribute to the fact that they are older machines but some seems to relate directly to the video card. How can I state it has to do with video cards? Testing. All things being the same except video, we replace the video card in an old machine with a newer gaming (read DirectX optimized) card with the same memory, the speed is quicker.

Secondly, and definitely the biggest issue, is getting new workstations with higher performing video cards. All the major manufacturers include high performance OpenGL cards in their machines. The gaming cards that have showed huge benchmark results are difficult, if not impossible to get as part of a workstation purchase. When asked about information on how things could work best, Bentley's response is:

We have not officially tested any of the GeForce graphics cards in our hardware testing program, however that does not necessarily mean that they will not work. We do not typically tell customers what type of card that they should use, only that it meet certain specifications which in the case of MicroStation V8 XM Edition, is: Graphics Card supported by DirectX 9c that supports a 24-bit or higher color depth, 128 MB RAM.

As far as what to do in the event of our customers having issues with one of these cards, obviously we would investigate it to see if the problem is directly related to our software, then we would try and fix it. If the problem is traced to something specific to the driver version of the card, then we can only hope that the manufacturer of the driver will assume responsibility for that issue. The card will most likely work, but any issues found may not ever get fixed. If the manufacturer of a graphics card states that they do not support certain applications with a particular card, then I guess the consumer would be purchasing at their own risk.

In supporting HP in this, I would suggest that they point their customers to our web site that lists the cards that we have tested if they are trying to consider what card to purchase. This list does not necessarily state that these are the ONLY cards that will run with MicroStation, only that these are the ones that we at Bentley have tested, and they can have some assurance that the cards on the list have gone through some very basic testing procedures and that no major issues were found.

Hopefully, this information is helpful.

Kevin Livelsberger
Platform Project Manager
Bentley Systems, Inc.

Now this is all well and good but why would Bentley provide a method, and supporting pages to Benchmark video cards but steer clear of helping customers with technical information as to why OpenGL cards perform much more poorly that the gaming cards? Why would Bentley provide a Benchmark page but not test the best performing video cards from that page? It just doesn't make any sense.

I certainly understand from a legal aspect that recommending video cards could get hairy. I wouldn't expect Bentley to put themselves in that position. I don't understand the reasoning behind not testing the best performing video cards according to the Bentley Benchmarking software. It's pretty rough on Bentley customer to go to their vendors and try to make a case to get nicer video and then have Bentley tell the vendor they haven't even tested these cards. Why should it be this tough? I would think Bentley would want their users to be able to get the best system. I'm willing to go to our vendors for that but getting a little support from Bentley would be very helpful.

How can we as MicroStation users get help in determining workstation beyond the obligatory "minimum" standards? MicroStation is far beyond a minimum software and shouldn't be treated in such a degrading manner.

Just my 2 cents.

Steve