Product In-Depth: Looking at Graphisoft ArchiCAD 17

Continued from page 3

Open BIM and Other Improvements

ArchiCAD 17 continues to offer more IFC support for national standards. New IFC data types are implemented in this release such as IFC System and IFC Time Series Schedule assignments, plus editable IFC Type Product entities. ArchiCAD 17 is IFC 2×3 Coordination View 2.0 certified.

In Publisher IFC models can be exported with various types of content with just one click. This means you can select things like just the load-bearing structure for the SE. Also new in this release is the timed new partnership with BIMObject.com. Now from within Graphisoft’s BIMcomponents.com you can search for and find more than a thousand real, up-to-date, manufacturer specific building components.

ArchiCAD 17 improves its Energy Evaluation engine which now supports multiple thermal blocks. Version 17 uses StruSoft’s VIPcore calculation engines.

BIMx is also now in every single ArchiCAD 17 installation. This interactive tool enables stakeholders to explore the BIM model even if they don’t know ArchiCAD or have a copy of ArchiCAD. It gives folks like clients and contractors the means to experience the BIM model on their desktop or iOS or Android device in a simplified way.

Industry Leading Performance

If the main story in version 17 is about letting the BIM model stay live all the way to the very end of construction documentation, a very big part of what makes that story possible lies in the program’s optimized code. If that wasn’t the case everybody doing BIM would be where Graphisoft is today.

When it comes to industry firsts, Graphisoft has lead all others in the areas of performance every step of the way. They were first to 64-bit computing for BIM. They were first with multi-core support. Now they are first with background processing. Eniko Pauko told us that Graphisoft is truly committed to staying ahead of the industry in the area of absolute performance, especially for very large projects.

ArchiCAD 17 users will now have at their disposal background processing, which leverages multi-core processing in the background as the user is manipulating large and complex BIM models that would otherwise take some time to regenerate. Additionally, the company has worked on optimizing its algorithms further to provide scaling of multi-core CPUs, improving on the raw performance from version 16. And lastly, it has further optimized its code base enabling improved utilization of GPUs to make navigating in OpenGL smoother.

Closing Thoughts

As in past Product In-Depths, we have not touched on every single new feature. ArchiCAD 17 contains dozens and dozens of additional features we skipped over. There are always new Library items for example or new abilities for components. For a detailed complete picture you can scan their product pages here.

As we revealed in our last feature on ArchiCAD, the Hungarian BIM leader has built its solid geometry modeling features on its own modeling kernel. We are continuously impressed with this foundational technology because as we witnessed in our web meeting the program works very smoothly in its new real-time cut planes. We get excited to see each release now as the company manages to deliver in two core areas we think can never fully be satisfied: absolute 3D performance and making the virtual building concept get more and more real. In this release, that latter ambition got a huge boost with the intelligent materials and priority connections. —- ANTHONY FRAUSTO-ROBLEDO, AIA, LEED AP