Hello All,
In recent times I have gotten frustrated with the performance of ITWIN when navigating the model. Compared to similar products in the market, it always seemed slow. I was aware of the settings below for some time but always thought of them as placebo settings to make us feel better. They never seemed to have any impact
I have a dedicated graphics card on my laptop and am always concerned about the windows battle between dedicated and integrated graphics cards so I set the following program setting within the Nvidia control panel. This never actually made any difference so I just put down the issue to ITWIN and chrome.
The key part in the dialogue box though is too easy to overlook though
It turns out that changing the settings within Itwin and the Nvidia control panel here is still overridden by windows and the common windows thought "this highly graphically complex task is definitely better handled by Integrated graphics. I will override the user settings as a dedicated graphics card is pointless for graphically complex tasks...".
To override windows' flawed logic I had to go into windows graphic settings and force another preference for the high-performance/dedicated graphics card option
You have to choose desktop app and browse to the browser exe file
Now and only now will windows allow the browser to utilise the dedicated graphics card and greatly improves the performance of navigating models within Itwin. It doesn't speed up the initial loading unfortunately but I can now navigate the model a lot faster.
Didn't it show a warning at startup that it is running on integrated graphics?Also with Intel graphics there are lot of artifacts so not even possible to work.
That warning only recently appeared. I've used those settings for a number of months with no feedback.
With the integrated graphics, it still worked but the performance wasn't great but still workable. Depends on what is integrated of course
Hi Thomas,
thanks a lot for your shared experience
Thomas Crawford said:and am always concerned about the windows battle between dedicated and integrated graphics cards
My experience is that the only safe way how to finish this battle is to not have the dedicated card :-))
Even though the situation is better than it was in the past (both on Windows and the card side), the benefits of dedicated card are very little comparing to all possible complications in my opinion.
Thomas Crawford said:Depends on what is integrated of course
It's the reason why I use only notebooks with AMD processors. Especially the generation released at the beginning of this year (so even not the latest, announced/released recently) offers substantially better integrated graphic performance than nearly any mobile dedicated card.
And there are plenty of other limits, not possible to break them, even when dedicated card is used.
Thomas Crawford said:It doesn't speed up the initial loading unfortunately
That depends on how tiled data is stramed from server and cached locally. Network connection and server response is always much slower than any notebook limits.
Regards,
Jan
Bentley Accredited Developer: iTwin Platform - AssociateLabyrinth Technology | dev.notes() | cad.point
Thank you for sharing,
I went through the same issues as you did. Nvidia panel settings did nothing until I modified those settings in the windows control panel.
It would be nice if we have a standalone client based on a web engine so we could activate these options only to the client and not to the whole browser, improving in that way battery life for laptops and having more control over the cached data to improve loading times.
Only to those who are in doubt if itwins is using the proper video card there is feature that will show some debugging data:
You could also check the performance tab of the task manager to see if the gpu usage ramps up when you use itwin navigation tools like zoom in and out:
If it doesn't you should enforce the usage of the dedicated graphics card.