AutoCAD GPU - performance metric?

[Senpuu]

When considering how the GPU affects performance working in AutoCAD, I'm not entirely sure how to think about one card versus another. I'm taken to understand that AutoCAD uses double precision floating point calculations, so is it fair to say that the single precision processing power is not terribly important by comparison? What kind of issues would I be seeing working in, say, a large model with a lot of detailed references, if the GPU horsepower was lacking, but all other aspects of the system (VRAM, RAM, CPU, HD read/write, etc...) were sufficient?

My machine at work has a FirePro W5100. Unless my google fu is terrible, this card is capable of 1430 GFLOPS SP and 89.2 GFLOPS DP, and has 4GB VRAM. Would a FirePro W8100 be only moderately better than my W5100 with 5237.8 GFLOPS SP for a 2.95x performance increase? Or would it be much, much better than my card because it is capable of 2109.45 GFLOPS DP for a 23.65x performance increase? Clearly the doubled VRAM to 8GB would be useful as well.

 

[sicily428]

When considering how the GPU affects performance working in AutoCAD, I'm not entirely sure how to think about one card versus another. I'm taken to understand that AutoCAD uses double precision floating point calculations, so is it fair to say that the single precision processing power is not terribly important by comparison? What kind of issues would I be seeing working in, say, a large model with a lot of detailed references, if the GPU horsepower was lacking, but all other aspects of the system (VRAM, RAM, CPU, HD read/write, etc...) were sufficient?

My machine at work has a FirePro W5100. Unless my google fu is terrible, this card is capable of 1430 GFLOPS SP and 89.2 GFLOPS DP, and has 4GB VRAM. Would a FirePro W8100 be only moderately better than my W5100 with 5237.8 GFLOPS SP for a 2.95x performance increase? Or would it be much, much better than my card because it is capable of 2109.45 GFLOPS DP for a 23.65x performance increase? Clearly the doubled VRAM to 8GB would be useful as well.

here a comparison geforces vs quadros vs radeon vs firepro
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-pascal,4572-9.html

 

[moonbogg]

Working in 3D using AutoCAD was outdated I thought. Anyway, being stuck with a crappy GPU when working with large assemblies really sucks big time. You can't zoom in or out or rotate it without massive stutters and freezes. Everything is like working in slow motion, with frequent crashes and lockups often times as well. You can't make drawings without massive lag. It will seriously take days to do something that should take hours, and hours to do something that should take minutes.
So, you have all this pain in the ass going on and at the same time your ridiculous employer expects you to pump out drawings like a copy machine or something. Get a new Quadro card, something in the $800 range is usually sufficient. I say "sufficient" and not "amazing for the next 5 years" for a reason. No one should be expected to suffer through a job with a crappy computer or GPU. Ask me how I know! Go ahead!