RFO Benchmark for 2017

Just wanted to provide a quick update on the new benchmark. It appears that Autodesk is continuing to push performance in new and interesting ways, and for 2017 this means that DWG Export is now GPU accelerated! That’s great news from a “butt dyno” standpoint, but it’s problematic from a benchmarking standpoint. This is because, while we in the industry are sometimes using journals in a “production” sort of way, this is not at all what Autodesk sees them for. In Autodesk’s mind journals are for regression testing only, and performance doesn’t matter there. So things like GPU based acceleration of non graphic functionality simply isn’t implemented in journal playback. What does that mean in real world terms? It means the Export test for 2017 is reporting double the times of previous years, unless you are running a VM, and then it’s reporting as much as a 500% increase in Export test times. But in real world usage DWG Exports are actually marginally faster in 2017. In other words, that benchmark test is now worse that useless, it’s downright misleading.
I am looking into the other tests to make sure this condition doesn’t occur more than the once, and I am removing those tests that are no longer valid. And hopefully I can finalize that effort and publish the 2017 RFO Benchmark in the very near future.

UPDATE (2016.07.13): It seems that GPU acceleration was NOT the issue for the 2017 test. Rather, there is a bug in 2017, and DWG export is crazy slow if you have anti-aliasing enabled. Turn it off and DWG exports are speedy again. The benchmark will leave it enabled since that’s a more real world condition, and once the bug is fixed we’ll see that in the benchmark results.
That said, the troubleshooting of this issue led me to the realization that Export really belongs in it’s own subsection like Render and Graphics, so the model building section can actually be JUST about model building and general daily use workflows. To that end, RFO Benchmark v3 is being finalized, for 2015-2017 initially. Stay tuned, it’s almost done!

RFO Benchmarks can be downloaded here, after joining Revit Forum.

Thanks!
Gordon