Support for multi-core processors with AutoCAD

Issue

You are using a computer with a multi-core processor, and you have noticed that the acad.exe process does not use 100% of your available CPU resources. You want to know if AutoCAD supports multi-core processors.

Solution

AutoCAD only supports multi-core technology in a couple of very specific areas of the product, including:

• 2D regeneration
• MentalRay rendering

In order to fully benefit from multi-core processors, you need to use multi-threaded software and AutoCAD is predominatley a single-threaded application.

A CPU-intensive operation that uses 100% of the resources of a single-core processor will only use a maximum of 50% of the CPU for that same operation on a dual-core computer, and only 6% of each CPU on a 16-core computer. This is shown in the following image:

Due to the lack of multi-threading, AutoCAD is not capable of using more than 50% of the CPU on a dual-core computer, so there is no significant performance gain over a single CPU computer except for the areas noted above.