Legacy toolpaths take hours to complete

[The IT Guy]

I have deployed computers with the latest CPU technology I could find today, the Intel i9 9900K. I participated in the benchmark thread to prove to my programmers that their computers are as fast as it gets today. Still I am hit with complaints that their legacy toolpaths take hours to complete on complex 5 axis operations. So much time is wasted waiting on MasterCAM. Is there anything that can be done?

Is there some magical CPU that I don't know about that can handle the workload any faster? Can they use different toolpaths that are better optimized? (They tell me they have to use legacy toolpaths for this work)

Are we just waiting on MasterCAM development to catch up with modern technology? I am expecting GPU accelerated math functions but it looks like they are still struggling with traditional multi-threading. Should we be using a different CAM software?

[Matthew Hajicek - Singularity]

Can you post a problematic file for people to review?

One thing that may help is a little trick I figured out in the late 90's when running on a 266MHz Pentium.  When trying out paths and parameters to see what will work, set the tolerance and stepover very loose; then it will generate rapidly and you can see if the motion is what you want.  Then once it's dialed in, set the tolerance and stepover to what you actually want, and regen while taking a short break.  For me at the time it was 15 - 25 minutes for a nice flowline on the neck of a guitar.

[The IT Guy]

Thanks for the offer and suggestion Matt. There is no way I can share any of our files. I understand that limitation makes it so you can't help directly.

[Chally72]

If not a direct file, can you make and share a representative example file with typical paths/geometry/settings that are producing the long regen times? It's hard to discuss anything other than anecdotal suggestions otherwise, and it leaves us without any direct comparisons to make on what times are expected and what times can possibly be improved somehow.

Just one example of the possibilities otherwise- a recent thread on the official Mastercam forum noted that surface blend paths were taking an excessive amount of time to generate with a Windows 10 Pro, 64-bit, 32gb Ram, i7-7820X and NVidia P4000 graphics card. Driver issues were a culprit:

Quote

On another note it seems that the bios and some of the utility drivers were in need of an update. Surprising to me was that my crunch times went from 7m40s down to 1m50s when regenerating a single op. Made the regen on a 12 ops selection go from 278 min down to 22 minutes. Pretty significant decrease for just updating the bios and utility drivers.