I don't have nearly the experience you have in numbers of years. Also, we avoid point cloud data as much as possible, we mostly just build finish grade models which is not resource intensive. I am sure that it has gotten clunkier and slower over the years. I can't comment on cost as we pay $2k per year on a license plus $1k for RPS commands and we feel there is tremendous value in that as we use it every day. But we also don't do takeoffs or process any point clouds so we don't need the more expensive licenses.
I'll just comment on a couple things from what I do know.
Xeon processors are surely the best processors for processing point cloud data, UAS Master tasks. But they're not the best you can get for the majority of TBC operations which are all single core speed. This is typical of most CAD program applications, single core is king. In that situation the best processors you can get are consumer grade intel processors. Also, through real world testing we have discovered that the latest Intel Core Ultra processors are better than the 13th generation Core i9 even though that processor benchmarks the fastest single core speed. I have other evidence from those who use different CAD programs that the Core Ultras perform best. Our team uses Core Ultra 7s, not even the 9s and in testing it beat the 13th gen i9 that was also overclocked.
The real question is, what is the single core speed of the Xeon processors you're running?
Also, when you say mirroring to your hard drive, for years we thought we were successfully mirroring to our hard drives from the cloud, and when I originally created this post, that's what we were doing. It turns out that the way that specific cloud platform mirrored to the hard drive (similar to almost every other cloud platform), it was actually causing the slow open and save times. Also some other things as well due to the nature of where it technically stored the files.
We switched to a self-hosted platform that truly keeps the files on each of our hard drives, and syncs changes to the cloud. It has sped all of that up, I'm actually impressed with how fast it opens projects now.
The other thing I was wondering, as technology advances, is there a chance your point clouds are bigger and more complex than before? Also, are there any settings that may be resetting when you upgrade versions?
I'd love to take a shot at some of the data you're struggling with. We're always trying to speed up TBC for our team. So any research is great for us.
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Adam Bower
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Original Message:
Sent: 07-04-2025 07:49
From: Stevie McCafferty
Subject: TBC Taking Forever to Open
Hi Adam,
No I'm running dual Intel Xeon CPUs with 160Gb Ram, dedicated Nvidia Quadro graphics and multiple NVMe drives.
My projects are a whole range of things, and it's become fairly normal to find myself sitting back watching the dials spin as TBC works on rebuilding surfaces, or changing views, or exporting data etc. Last night, I was working on some point cloud data, and trying to export surfaces generated from these to cad was taking probably 10 - 15 mins per export (and they weren't large).
No issues with logins etc - I'm permananetly logged in, and use a hardware licence. Many of my project files are held on the cloud, but are mirrored to local drives where they're accesed from.
I remember probably 10 years ago, when people used to remark at the impressive speed that TBC would present things, but over time it just seems to be getting clunkier and clunkier, with the cost ever increasing... and relying more on 3rd parties to suppliment the functionality. I'm not really keen on moving to Civil 3D but after being a Trimble user for the last 20 years or so, I'm now seeing the likes of N4CE looking increasingly slick by comparison to TBC for modelling.
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Stevie McCafferty
Original Message:
Sent: 07-04-2025 06:10
From: Adam Bower
Subject: TBC Taking Forever to Open
By chance are you running an AMD processor? They're not supported though I haven't heard of them causing major issue so I doubt it's that but wanted to check.
Also what types of command and what types of projects are you working on? We build models of varying sizes, we have 6 users running TBC and have no problems whatsoever. We have also run TBC on multiple devices from laptops to desktops, even a desktop with integrated graphics.
There are some commands that will take a long time. Project cleanup remove duplicate lines can take forever if you have an overwhelmingly large number of lines which sometimes happens when bringing in an engineers CAD file or if you explode blocks that probably shouldn't be exploded.
Also if you run a subscription license you have to login and activate the license or else it will run painfully slow almost glitching. This shouldn't be your issue because if you're running commands it would force you to login correcting that problem.
In terms off hardware resources CAD platforms hardly use any. That's in general. They thrive off single core CPU speed which is unrelated to the percent utilization. Also graphics cards make almost no difference unless you're processing point cloud data.
If you day your specs, you can feel free to send us the files and commands you're running and we can show you what it does on our system.
Oh also, are your files stored on your hard drive directly or through any type of cloud platform?
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Adam Bower
Original Message:
Sent: 07-04-2025 04:37
From: Stevie McCafferty
Subject: TBC Taking Forever to Open
Mine is painfully slow these days - when I check to see how much of my computer resources TBC is using, it's barely touching anything... Processor / graphics / ram etc are hardly utilised given the capacity, yet TBC takes an age to do anything. I'm at the point where I often click for a command, go away to do something else, and then come back after a while when it's actually completed. Definitely making me wonder about other software solutions - especially given the premium price TBC attracts.
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Stevie McCafferty
Original Message:
Sent: 03-30-2023 15:19
From: Adam Bower
Subject: TBC Taking Forever to Open
Anyone have any idea why TBC can take so long to open up? Sometimes it takes forever even on small job. I don't remember it always being this bad. I feel like it keeps getting worse. I have too many projects in my Trimble Synchronizer Data folder, I wonder if that could affect startup, I can't figure it out.
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Adam Bower
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