The Golden State Warriors set a new record in the 2015–2016 National Basketball Association (NBA) regular season, compiling a record-setting 73-9 record. Of those nine losses, seven were road games. Similarly, the Chicago Cubs were the best team in major league baseball in 2016, winning 103 regular season games. They won more games at home than any other team.
Sports teams have proven how the environment can affect performance. This is also true for graphics and workstation performance.
Performance for a graphics card or a workstation might scream on consumer or lightweight CAD benchmarks, but slow to an excruciating crawl when it comes to tests taken from real CAD/CAM applications.
How Do You Measure?
If you're an IT manager for a company that relies heavily on CAD and engineering, or the owner of even a small design and engineering shop, it's likely that graphics and workstation performance affects your bottom line.
So how do you find out what that workstation is doing under the hood for your application? You benchmark it.
Ideally, you should run tests on your own models and the operations on those models that you perform daily. But that's difficult and time-consuming, and requires expertise that you might nothave inhouse.
Fortunately, there is the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation's Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (SPEC/GWPG). It's a nonprofit group that's been around for 30 years, and develops graphics and workstation benchmarks based on actual applications and real-world workloads, including ones for design and analysis tasks.
Covering the Waterfront
If you want the best representation of total performance for a specific application, then go for SPEC application performance characterization (SPECapc) benchmarks. These benchmarks require installing a specific version of the application you want to benchmark. They use models and workloads that represent those used by design and engineering professionals, and provide a comprehensive picture of CPU, GPU and I/O performance.
Current SPECapc benchmarks for CADcover PTC Creo 3.0, SOLIDWORKS 2015, and Siemens NX 9.0/10.0.
Measuring Graphics Performance
If you don't have easy access to the application you wish to benchmark, or if you're interested primarily in graphics performance, you can run SPECviewperf. SPECviewperf measures the 3D graphics performance of systems running under the OpenGL and DirectX application programming interfaces.
SPECviewperf workloads, called viewsets, represent graphics content and behavior extracted from professional applications, without the need to install the applications themselves.
The benchmark works by playing back the sequence of graphics commands and data recorded from the application. This means you can trust that your measured graphics performance matches the performance you can expect from the application given the same scene and rendering mode. The test system's CPU plays the same role in SPECviewperf as it does in the application, providing further confidence in the accuracy and relevance of the resulting scores.
SPECviewperf 12.1, the current version, includes viewsets for CATIA, PTC Creo, Siemens NX, SOLIDWORKS and Autodesk Showcase.
SPEC/GWPG also provides nearly 100 peer-reviewed SPECviewperf results published on the SPEC website. The results provide a convenient avenue for performance comparisons across a broad selection of graphics processing units (GPUs).
Total Workstation Performance
If you are interested in total workstation system performance—CPU, GPU, I/O and memory bandwidth—you can download SPECwpc V2.0, which includes all of the CAD/CAM viewsets above, plus additional product development, media and entertainment, financial services, energy, life sciences, and general operations workloads.
Like SPECviewperf, SPECwpc is a self-contained software package that doesn't require you to install or run the applications themselves.
Also available for SPECwpc V2.0 are more than 20 peer-reviewed results on the SPEC website. These can be used directly for performance comparison or to see how your results compare to those officially accepted by the SPECwpc committee.
Is It Worth It for You?
All SPEC/GWPG benchmarks are free to use for any organizations or individuals not involved in the computer marketplace. Check the download page to see if you qualify for a free download.
If you are pondering benchmarking but think it might not be worth the effort, consider this: Who are the most important people in your organization and how much time do they spend working in a particular CAD/CAM environment?
If you can save these VIPs an hour or two a week with better-performing graphics cards and/or workstations, it just might be worth the time and effort to benchmark.