Posted 04 September 2012 - 11:13 PM
Works on my machine TM. I have AutoCAD 2011 and NanoCAD 3.5 on the same laptop (HP 8530w C2D 2.8 T9600, 8GB with an SSD). I have tried them at the same time with the same drawing with 19500 objects including a lot of text & attributes, and they are reasonably close in speed. AutoCAD pans faster (just) and has smoother text but there's not much in it.
I tried a find/replace experiment on the same drawing, replacing "1" with "x". Both apps took 43 seconds to find them all, AutoCAD found 7448 matches and NCAD counted 9446 matches (different settings, I think but somewhat of a mystery). The replacement part of the experiment went to crap when I realised that NCAD updates its list for every replacement it makes, as it goes along. I gave up after a few minutes. AutoCAD did the replacements in one step in 1:27. They both seem to waste a lot of time updating the UI as they go rather than turning off repaint and turning it on at the end to do one UI update. I dunno, it's probably a lot more complex than that - I haven't seen the source code.
What these numbers don't tell you is that NanoCAD's find / replace is far more usable than AutoCAD's - it's non-modal (you can pan the drawing underneath it) and it offers more versatility. Saying that, both have functions and usability the other doesn't have. eg. AutoCAD can create a selection set from the find-results, NanoCAD does regular expressions. NanoCAD has a stop button, in case you don't want to wait. THIS WINS.
This is only a cursory glance and not a real test but it seems to perform quite ok to me. I think OpenGL compatibility is the key here - my laptop has a Quadro Fx graphics card in it.
Will: How did the driver update go? I let Windows update handle mine these days after an NVidia Quadro driver kept crashing when a Displaylink driver started. I uninstalled both and deleted the files, rebooted, clicked yes to Windows update and it has been fine ever since. Wow, they actually do test them??
cheers
Ewen