The Fastest 3D CAD System in the World…Hasta la Vista Baby!

Ralph Grabowski recently wrote about the impact of Microsoft’s Vista release on 3D CAD applications using OpenGL versus Direct X. From Ralph’s upFront.eZine newsletter Issue #504 from February 3, 2007:

--------------------------------------------
Wow! Vista Runs CAD (up to) 50x Slower
. . . . .
Bill Gates thinks Vista is "Wow!", and Tom's Hardware thinks so, too. The popular benchmarking site ran the SPECviewperf 9.03 benchmarks on several CAD systes, and found that they slow to a crawl under Vista. Compared with XP, here are the results:

Pro/Engineer = 6.7x slower.
SolidWorks = 9.0x slower.
TeamCenter = 9.1x slower.
UGS NX = 50x slower.
--------------------------------------------

This is big news.

While I am sure the CAD vendors listed above are not so happy with Vista and its impact on their OpenGL-based applications, Alibre thinks Vista is “Wow!” too.

Alibre Design just got an order of magnitude faster than every OpenGL-based CAD application -- and that is essentially all of them! Could it be that Alibre Design is now the fastest 3D CAD system in the world? OK, we'll settle for 9x faster than SolidWorks and 50x faster than UG. Couple that with the most affordable 3D CAD application and you have an unbeatable value proposition.

Now I might be prone to hyperbole from time to time, but the reality is that Alibre has based our graphics pipeline on DirectX/Direct3D from the beginning. At the time we made that choice OpenGL was perceived as the only way to go for a sophisticated 3D graphics application like CAD. It would also be true to say that this thinking has continued up until the present day, probably right up to the launch of Vista. I think I can safely say now that this was the old way of thinking.

Alibre Design runs just as fast on Vista and will continue to improve given Microsoft's and our own ongoing investment in DirectX. I will note that while we have not released our Vista-certified version, it is in the final stages of testing and its release is imminent.

The DirectX/OpenGL debate is really only a small part of the overall shift that is occurring in the CAD market. Since Alibre came on the scene most CAD vendors have also told and continue to tell their customers and the market that you couldn’t possibly make professional 3D CAD accessible to anyone who wanted it. Of course, they don’t say this directly, but they say it much more clearly in their day to day business practices: with the prices they charge, the increasingly esoteric features they focus on release after release that appeal to fewer and fewer people, with customer-hostile forced retirements, with encrypted file formats intended to lock customers in, and on and on. This is also old thinking.

The world is changing quickly, flattening as some have described it. At the same time new economies are growing dramatically with the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, formerly exclusive technologies and business opportunities are becoming accessible to literally anyone. Low-cost hardware, open-source software, offshore development talent, and pay-per-click search engine marketing have rapidly collapsed the up-front cost of starting a company. You can even buy an NC mill from Sherline or Tormach, or even Sears, for as low as a couple of thousand dollars, and low-cost desktop 3D printers under $5,000 are imminent. And, of course, world-class 3D parametric CAD can be had by anyone, starting at free. A whole new group of micro-cap VCs are popping up to fund these new low-cost startups. There is a good post titled “It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur” from a while back by Joe Krause, the founder of JotSpot that was recently acquired by Google, and another by Josh Kopelman, a Managing Partner of First Round Capital, that provides a viewpoint on this trend in a posting called “The New Dual Track”.

Back on the topic of Vista and its effect on 3D CAD applications, all CAD vendors have known the Vista/DirectX issue was coming for much more than a year. Those that are scrambling now were either asleep at the wheel or just didn’t care. Personally, I think it is the latter, as it corresponds to what we've been trying to tell the market for a long time. Microsoft's Vista release and the associated DirectX/OpenGL impact just helped us say it with feeling.

To the vendors listed by Ralph above, as they begin to haggle about who runs the least slowest on Vista, I would simply say, ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee!

Hasta la Vista Baby!

Comments

[matt]

Certainly you've heard of companies such as ATI and nVidia? There were no CAD companies who were asleep at the wheel or apathetic about the situation. Microsoft code was in a lot of flux up to the end, and the video card companies that write drivers didn't have much time to react. Drivers are now available that bring the performace up comparable to XP. The Toms Hardware article you cite is pretty old, as beta versions of OSes go. The APC benchmarks are also written for versions of software which is not written for Vista, so the results are highly suspect to begin with.

Also, certainly you've heard of RAM? Vista hogs it bigtime which is going to affect everyone. I think this is starting to spell b-a-c-k-l-a-s-h for Microsoft. Alibre would have more chance of gaining market share by porting to OSX than hoping Microsoft's OpenGL bobble accidently gives you the trophy.

Still, best of luck.

[mac user]

what a sad sad blog entry.what conflicting messages in this blog.

building on a closed proprietary system and gloating on an accidental leg up, while chastising other CAD vendors for making entry for the masses in to 3d expensive and difficult.

maybe you haven't noticed but proprietary vista and directx is a high entry cost for the small business owner, amateur or enthusiast.

this blog entry reminds of 1999, when companies bet their websites and futures on Internet Explorer instead of open standards. ( this website can only be used in IE5) remember those?

The world has changed and soon enough the alibre target market will move on to open sourced,cheaper,inter-operable operating systems.

Good luck, hopefully, Alibre won't be left high and dry in the walled garden of windows?

[Steven Kempton]

I definitely agree with all the things you say about the future Greg, especially the idea that this high-end 3D CAD technology will be (already is) available for use by everyone. The world has changed. The adoption of new technology will help everyone and that adoption speed has only increased over the last 20 years. This is an exciting positive thing for all.

[Maxim Narbrough]

Hello Greg,

Interesting blog, but I don't entirely swallow the hyperbole on the virtues of DirectX over OpenGL. I appreciate that much of the graphics hardware that will be used with Alibre is likely to be consumer Nvidia and ATI gaming cards, and that many of the "home users" using your products will use vista due to it coming with the machines they purchase. Despite the phasing out of XP support there seems to be a widespread reluctance atleast here in Europe to transfer professional workstations to Vista, and for obvious enough reasons.

While there does not appear to be any major technical advantage to either architecture, I personally don't like proprietary lock-in a la Microsoft,Apple or whoever. I also use other CAD software which demands opengl, so Vista is not a viable option for the time being being the buggy resource hog it is. I don't actually know anyone who uses Vista for their CAD workstations, so I suppose I can see that you might be trying to fill this niche.
However, i'm curious to understand if there could be any virtue in suporting both architectures as do Autodesk for example, or would this be a major and unnecessary drain on programmer resources?

I like your business model and its a refreshing development to see you target a decent CAD package at the less well catered for area of Home-professional cad use. Following your line of thinking, wouldnt it be truly democratizing to see your software transferred onto the linux platform, where there exists a blatant lack of decent CAD software. Cross-platform open-standards based CAD sounds like an ideal option from my perspective, but then again I don't have a clue as to the ins and outs of the market you are dealing with.

I look forward to seeing how your products develop as I would much like to adopt Alibre into every day use for future ventures.
kind regards,

Maxim.