Graphics Performance In Solid Edge ST2 MP8

Looks like my graphics performance comparison involving 13 CAD systems shook up a few CAD vendors and a bunch of users. Its not like I started getting hate mail or something. But I did get a few public comments and a bunch of private email telling me that my test could have been done better. On the Rhino newsgroup there was a discussion on how it was unfair that Rhino was the only CAD system that had isocurves turned on. Well, that’s really not my problem because, like I mentioned in my post, I was interested in comparing the graphics  performance of the CAD systems as they came out of the box because that was how most users use them. If the CAD vendors have set up default graphics settings that were not friendly to large models then maybe that is something they need to think about.

Someone on Twitter complained that I should have used Rhino 5 Beta since that supposedly had better graphics. So to satisfy him and other Rhino users I loaded the engine model in Rhino 5 Beta with isocurves turned off and posted this. As you can see there was an improvement but nowhere close to the kind of superior graphics performance seen in other CAD systems.

But probably the people who were most vocal were Solid Edge users. They started telling me that Siemens had done some major enhancements to Solid Edge’s graphics in Maintenance Pack 7 and that I should try this again after installing the update. I even got an emails from people at Siemens itself. So I download and installed the latest maintenance pack 8 which was released just yesterday and did the test once again. For comparison sake here is the original video with Solid Edge ST2 without any maintenance packs.

And here is the graphics performance after applying Maintenance Pack 8.

Indeed, there is an improvement. But the graphics performance its nowhere close to better CAD systems in the comparison. I guess I will need to wait to get my hands on a beta of Solid Edge ST3, or wait for Siemens to let me talk about it, to see if it really has the 4x better graphics  performance that the company claims. I intend to do this again in Solid Edge ST3 when I get the chance and will post my results here on this blog.