As our company moves to free seating, we have started moving users from workstations to laptops. Architects have started complaining regarding Enscape speed compared to workstations. I know this is no surprise, but I wondered if I could get some recommendations regrading laptop hardware?
The hardware specs we are currently testing: Windows 10 (64bit), 64GB RAM, CPU: i9-12950HX, GPU: Nvidia RTX A4500
The issue we see now is that if we open a rather large model from Sketchup and then start Enscape, it takes a long time 5 minutes before the model finally opens and starts real-time rendering. Workstations use only 2 minutes according to users. We have tried to look at the task manager and used various programs but we cannot see that it’s much going on GPU/CPU-wize during the loading. I wonder if anybody could enlighten me of what’s going on while a model is loading in Enscape.
From my top of mind: I guess the model data is pushed to GPU VRAM? Is this mainly a bus issue and not GPU-related? I suspect we see the exact same time if we use another internal Intel GPU as the issue is more a bus-related issue as the GPU rendering is not started yet while loading?
Thanks a lot for your post and welcome to our Forum.
Generally large and complex models can of course take longer to load and render, especially on laptops. Optimizing the model by reducing unnecessary geometry and utilizing layers can help reduce loading times, but even without these steps it shouldn’t usually take a “VERY long time” loading the project into the GPU’s VRAM.
Further, could you kindly provide additional information about how long it actually roughly takes to load in minutes? And wow large is the project exactly in gigabytes? I also reckon that the laptops you are using have an SSD installed as their main drive? (A slower HDD would explain longer loading too)
Please also send in a feedback report from any of the RTX A4500 machines including log files, just so we can check those for any potential hints as to why it’s taking that long.
I’ve observed 3 “phases” in Task Manager when starting Enscape :
1 - single threaded calculations (so overall CPU utilization is low, but basically one core is maxed.)
2- brief burst of multi-core calcs (overall CPU usage to 100%)
3 - GPU Load to 100% when the model finally loads (task Manager doesn’t seem to show this, I use GPU-Z)
Have you actually benchmarked/timed the laptop against the desktops? And if so, what are the desktop specs? I’d suspect the issue to be more about user perception and/or model management. “This file worked fine last week on my desktop, now it is super slow on my laptop.” (Not mentioning they added 1000 trees between last week and today.)
You can’t get much better on the laptop specs. You could move from the “Pro” Nvidia GPU to the gaming line (the laptop 4090 is pretty impressive.) But that won’t help with the CPU-bound load times.
Take these benchmarks with a grain of salt but they generally correspond to what I’ve seen with Enscape performance on various GPUs.