Autodesk Suites: Showcase uses a lot of GPU and will make some of your products "slower"

Autodesk Showcase 2013 which is in most of the Autodesk Design & Creation Suites is basically like a real time renderer.  Basically, you apply a shader and go and the result is awesome.  IMHO, you can use the print screen option and use the image in your demo real or portfolio*! To make this techology work, Showcase requires serious GPU muscle and it will use all of it. 

Issue

"One of the side effects is that if you are running AutoCAD, Inventor and Revit at the same time as Showcase, you may experience some slow downs."

Solution

"Autodesk Showcase uses the graphics card to its full potential.  This may sometimes lead to other applications not having enough resources to maintain acceptable performance and responsiveness. 

In particular, the Task UI feature in Showcase is most associated with such performance degradation in other products.  Turning this Showcase feature off by temporarily toggling Options -> Show Task UI  (Q) will restore the previous performance levels in your Autodesk product."

Reference:

AutoCAD 
http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=TS19324337

Revit
http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=TS19334350

Inventor
http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=TS19334343

 

*An very interesting article on renderfarms is here:

http://www.slashfilm.com/cool-stuff-a-look-at-pixar-and-lucasfilms-renderfarms/

Epilogue

As of May 10th, 2012, this issue is resolved when you install Showcase 2013 SP1.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/index?siteID=123112&id=2334435&linkID=9242539

Comments

[Peter]

David - Does Showcase use the cuda cores found on nvidia cards? Is that the cause of the slowdown? I know that in max 2013 you can select to render on your CPU - or GPU - or both. When using both you really notice the sluggishness of all other windows. The last line of the post says turning "Show Task UI" off cures the problem - is that stopping Showcase using cuda?