Hello Everyone,
We are going to start managing the IT for a local environmental consultant. One of the projects they want us to work on is a new PC upgrade for the users. They use ArcGIS Pro, which is new to us (the MSP). From my research, and from talking to our new client, it looks like they are considered to be heavy users of ArcGIS Pro. We know that they tend to use spatial analysis often, which looks like can be accelerated using a decent GPU. If we knew more about ArcGIS Pro, we would include more examples. We think it's safe to assume that they need hardware that can handle all of the different types of workloads ArcGIS Pro is capable of producing.
So here are some questions.
1. Does the CPU benefit from:
1A. A faster clock speed? (single threaded performance)
1B. More cores? (multi threaded performance)
1C. More on-die CPU cache? (for example: AMD 5800X3D since it has AMD 3D V-Cache)
For question 1, we believe the answer is 1A (a faster clock speed as ArcGIS Pro is mostly single threaded). However, we don't know if there are certain use cases where 1B or 1C would be better answers. If so, which use cases?
2. Consumer or Workstation GPU?
2A. If we stick with NVIDIA GPUs, would additional CUDA cores be the best way of gaining performance?
2B. Would double precision floating point performance make a perceivable difference in speed?
2C. Would there be a point of diminishing returns? How about for CUDA cores and RAM capacity? Is a 3060 (non-Ti) be enough for heavy ArcGIS Pro usage?
For around the same price of a RTX 3080 Ti 12 GB card (~$1230-$1300), would a RTX A4000 16 GB (~$1130) offer more performance? The RTX 3080 Ti generally has better performance (40% more CUDA cores), but the RTX A4000 has better double precision FP performance, and 16 GB (4 GB more, but also slower) RAM.
We know that spatial analysis is able to use GPU acceleration. Though I'm not sure which type of GPU (consumer/workstation) is best for performance per $.
3. Would we be better off sticking with 64 GB / 128 GB of DDR4? Or with 64 GB / 128 GB of DDR5? Beyond looking at the steep price of DDR5...
3A. At the same capacity, would the speed or latency matter more? DDR4 can easily have 14/16 CL, and is typically around 3600 MT/s. While current high end DDR5 is 30 CL, but is typically 5600+ MT/s.
3B. How rare would it be for ArcGIS Pro to consume more than 64 GB of RAM? Should we aim for 128 GB of RAM instead?
For the NVMe drive. We were planning on using a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro for the OS, and a 1 TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus that will only store the ArcGIS Pro files. We're planning on putting the Sabrent drive (ArcGIS files) in the M.2 slot directly connected to the CPU, and the Samsung drive (OS) in the M.2 slot connected to the PCH. We figure this would be the best way of gaining local disk performance.
Here are the two builds we was looking into. The mid range build is ~$2300, while the dream machine build is ~$4,300. We have a feeling that the mid range build wouldn't be bottlenecked by anything ArcGIS Pro is possibly capable to do. But since we (the MSP) know basically nothing about ArcGIS Pro, that might be a poor assumption. How much more of an improvement should we expect with the dream machine build? We are starting to doubt that it will be worth it, since it is nearly 2x the budget. And should just stick with recommending the mid range build.
Mid range build: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/pcpartpicker33/saved/3kBFZL
Dream machine build: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/pcpartpicker33/saved/wsNspg
Thanks for your help!
