Poor 3D performance with Quadro 2000

[Jimbo_Jet]

For those who look to this thread prior to purchasing, I spec'ed out our new computers, and they're working great:

Dell Precision M6600, Windows 7 64-Bit, Intel [Quad-]Core i7, 16 GB Ram, 2 GB Nvidia Quadro 3000M

... Using Land Desktop 2009, Civil 3D 2011, Map 3D 2011, Civil 3D 2012, AutoCAD MEP 2012, etc.

Can you verify with a GPU monitor that the Quadro card is being used in 3D cad and it's not just down to the CPU?

[Jimbo_Jet]

I've just had a direct response from an nVidia representative after asking them a direct question on the matter. Here is there response:

Hello,

Thank you for your submission. I wish I have good news to offer but Autodesk has decided to stop supporting external drivers starting with AutoCAD 2012. That is the main reason NVIDIA no longer offer performance drivers after AutoCAD 2011. This is not limited to NVIDIA GPUs and as far as I know this is true for AMD FirePro GPUs as well. Unfortunately there is nothing within the core of AutoCAD 2012 that will be able to take advantage of the Quadro GPU more than any other GPU without the performance drivers. The performance advantage that the Quadro GPU provided with previous versions of AutoCAD using the NVIDIA performance drivers is entirely gone.

Having said that we are working with Autodesk to better take advantage of the Quadro GPU in future release of AutoCAD, but I don't have any ETA on when this will be available. This is entirely up to Autodesk. This is a common question/concern, but unfortunately our hands are tied in this matter. We're doing all we can to assist Autodesk to take advantage of the Quadro GPU. We've published an article to our support knowledge base on this matter here: http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answe...AutoCAD%202012. I will make a post to the forum so others are aware of this limitation. Let me know if you have any further questions.


Best regards,
Ray

Very disappointing but I've asked in 2011 acceleration can be used instead. Here's my other thread over on the nVidia support forum:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s...&#entry1423416

[Jimbo_Jet]

So I sent this reply back to nvidia:

'Thank you for the answer RayW. This does explain a lot but I'm sure many people, including myself, will be disappointing when we bought a Quadro card specifically to accelerate AutoCAD. Accelerating 3dsMAX is just a nice bonus for me, but admittedly iray acceleration may well come in to it's own for me in the near future.

So as it stands can I use my Quadro 2000 to accelerate AutoCAD 2011 in some way as I could get a licence for 2011 instead? I notice on the nvidia drivers download that there are no AutoCAD performance drivers for Quadro 2000's but the 2011 AutoCAD performance driver does show for Quadro 4000 or above? I have tried downloading that instead but it will not let me install it
saying 'No application found for which a performance driver can be installed or updated.' Yet I have AutoCAD 2009, 2012 and 2013 on my system with active licences for each?

I'm ending my 2012 license soon and going to 2013 only but have the option to upgrade my standalone 2009 licence to 2011 instead of cancelling it in July - which I would do if I could use 2011 GPU CAD acceleration?

Thanks.'

And then I got this reply:

'That's a very good question and according to one of the engineers it should work. The NVIDIA performance “drivers” just make a check for a Quadro GPU to be in the system. The installer for the performance driver is the same for all everyone. It sniffs your system and installs performance drivers for every copy of Acad or 3ds Max it finds for the versions the installer includes - which I believe are versions 2011, 2010, 2009.

If you have AutoCAD 2009 installed then I don't understand why the performance driver is not detecting it. That error you get during install suggest it can't detect AutoCAD 2009, 2010, or 2011 installed. What may be causing this error is if you had already ran the installer before. We never fixed the installer’s less-than-ideal feedback text. It will never say “It’s already installed” but will give you the error you posted if it's already installed. You can verify by checking if there's an NVIDIA HDI driver (I forgot it’s exact name) listed in the AutoCAD 2009 interface under Config/System. If the driver is listed then the performance driver did install, otherwise it did not install and we'll have to determine why.'