OpenRoads Designer CONNECT Edition was announced by Bentley in November 2016. I'm trying to get a sense of how mature the product is for production use. I've been doing extensive research and will be moving into more rigorous testing to assess if the software can be used on full scale projects as the main design platform.
Is everyone using the latest Release? We've been using ORD for a major infrastructure project for the last year and apart for some bugs slipping their way through, like the mesh/linear element duplication issue and some profile issues, we're quite happy with it. Our biggest issue has been DWG exports, but this is a format we wish we weren't using anyway.
Definitely a complete rethink on how you deliver your projects and a lot of pre-planning and setup, but my biggest gripe is with performance for large projects with many many reference files, especially when creating Cross Sections.
Regards,
Mark
OpenRoads Designer 2023 | Microstation 2023.2 | ProjectWise 2023
Hi Mark,
Did you find it necessary to upgrade your workstation hardware to support ORD? If so in what capacity? Could you suggest an optimal hardware configuration in terms of CPU, RAM and graphics card?
Benzi
Hi Benzi,
Our team are using Dell Precision 5530 laptops with Intel Core i7 processors, SSD drives, Nvidia Quadro P1000 graphics and 32Gb RAM. The only improvement i would suggest is the graphics card as we seem to run out of steam with it by the end of a busy day and sometimes need to restart the machines.
Have you tested ORD on a desktop computer with similar specs to see performance benefits?
not yet, but its on my list. Happy to share results once i get them.
One thing we've found is that Joint Venture partners from organisations with closed IT systems seem to have much more issues with stability than we do. All our users have admin access to their machines and this seems to allow ORD to work much better - I suspect there is some attempted writing to Program Files folders for some reason, but i'm not too sure.
Also, slow internet seems to really affect startup time - probably from CONNECTION Client. We've found its much faster to start a session if we have fast internet or no internet at all,
We have Precision 7720 with P3000 and 32GB and it's still an issue.
I find ORD doesn't use the power of the GPU at all. Tested with AMD WX7100 too, this is in a desktop with àdmin and is more stable than Laptop, but still a lot of waiting.
SSD, CPU and RAM seem to be what ORD uses more than anything.
Regards
Chris
AECOM Roads UK&I Digital Engineering, Design & Solutions Lead | Sector Information Management Lead
Associate Director – Digital
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Our teams are typically using Dell Precision laptops with i7, Nvidia Quadro GPUs, high-end SSD storage. Typically ORD only uses a few CPU treads, and hardly any GPU processing, but it will use as much RAM as you have. Bentley needs to do some work on the CPU/GPU utilization and scale the processing according to the available hardware. Heck, our laptops will reboot Windows and all the startup programs faster than ORD loads a medium sized project file.