We have been hearing a lot of reports that Revit 2010 is not very stable. Many users have been experiencing crashes in the product. Through some investigation of Customer Error Reports (CER), see a great post about CER here, we are seeing that many users are crashing due to out of date video graphic card drivers.
In Revit 2010, there were changes made behind the scenes regarding the display of graphics in the application, a good post of the subject can be found in a post on Inside the Factory called Tuning the Graphics Engine, these changes might cause your old graphics card driver not to work as well before and may be the cause of the instablilty you are seeing.
Please, make sure that you are using the latest version of the driver for your graphics card.
This will greatly help the stability of Revit, preventing crashes from occuring. Also, if you are crashing, make sure you submit those CER reports with your email address and then go ahead and contact Autodesk Support or your Reseller for help.
Hmmmm....thanks for this but I'm not convinced about your view on using the latest drivers. I have a Dell latitude e6400 with an nvidia quadro graphics card. The laptop is running xp64, 8 gigs or RAM. If I install the latest Dell drivers, Revit 2010 slows down. It will work fine for about 10 mins, then for no reason it slows down. It doesn't crash, but becomes unusable. So I have to shut Revit down and restart. I rolled back the driver to one about 4 months old and then Revit is fine. Autodesk support are looking at this, but to be honest Autodesk need to publish an approved list of graphics cards, similar to what you do for 3dmax and Inventor and what Revit used to do in the old days.
Posted by: David Light | July 15, 2009 at 05:19 AM
As someone who has been bitten by new bugs in new drivers, I can't say I'm thrilled about needing to deploy new video drivers every three weeks whenever Nvidia drops a new 100 MB driver package on the world.
What you're really saying is that WHQL certification is really a meaningless dog-and-pony show. And Autodesk doesn't want to spend the money to certify drivers because it's time consuming and the driver landscape changes so quickly. Understandable, but not especially desirable, this push back to the customer.
The move away from OpenGL to DirectX was supposed to make this stuff better, and perhaps in time it will. For now, though, it's a tough sell.
Posted by: Joel Osburn | July 15, 2009 at 03:53 PM
I've got a Nvidia 7950 and tried the latest drivers. It was a no go. Revit was crashing about every 15 min. I installed the OEM drivers and at least my crashes are down to 2 hours or so. My system is the only dual/duo core system running Revit in the office. Other systems are identical except for the processor. They also have experienced some crashing, but not as frequently. All users experience graphics problems such icons that should be available for selection - turning grey.
Posted by: Aaron Rumple | July 27, 2009 at 01:09 PM
I've had several crashes before, it always came with a warning and an option to save to a recovery file. After installing a subscriber's update for Revit Structural a few weeks ago I had very random crashes that give no warning whatsoever...the application go poof! No trace or pattern to it. We tried fixes involving graphics card drivers and memory upgrades to no avail. We not only losing productivity manhours....we're losing our cool!
Posted by: RGV | November 03, 2009 at 02:09 AM