Project Views and Performance

Configure project views to optimize Revit performance.

Consider the following best practices for managing views in your project.

• To improve performance when opening the project, set a drafting view with few if any elements as the starting view. See Specify the Starting View for a Model.
• Minimize view depth where possible in elevation, plan, and section views so that geometry hidden by other elements in the view does not affect the view drawing performance. See About the View Range.
• Consider back-clipping views to reduce the quantity of geometry maintained in a view. Often the overhead associated with additional object cutting due to back clipping is more than offset by the resulting reduced geometry maintenance. See Cut a Plan View at a Clip Plane.
• Use section boxes to limit visible geometry when working in a 3D view. See Change the Extents of a 3D View.
• Minimize the number of views in a project to reduce model size. Likewise, consider deleting as many views as possible from static models linked into the model.
• Use Wireframe or Shading display styles when working in a linked file environment. See Visual Styles.
• Avoid hiding large quantities of individual elements in views.
• Turn off unnecessary categories in Visibility/Graphics and templates. See About the Visibility and Graphic Display Dialog.
• When you use the Paste Aligned tool to closed views, target views will open and close. When repeating this several times, you can improve performance by opening all the target views before beginning the sequence of paste operations. Paste Aligned Elements.
• Zoom in to speed up drawing and snapping.
• If you have a dense view and snap lines appear to be shooting off in all directions, deselect the Snap to Remote Objects setting in the snap dialog. See Snaps Dialog.
• Close unnecessary views.
  • When working in a 3D view, most of the file is placed into RAM. These views should be closed when saving to central, because Revit will update this complex view as part of the save process.
  • Although Revit is optimized to update only views that are visible or become visible to the user, you can close inactive views to recover memory allocated to those views.
• Assign the proper level of visual detail to a given view. In a 1/8" plan view, assigning a Fine level of display detail may be unnecessary. Plan views with fine and medium detail level are slow to open if there are many wall join layers to route. Use a Coarse view setting unless you need to show greater detail. See Specify the Detail Level for a View.
• Unless necessary, turn off shadows in views and before printing. See Display Sun and Shadows.
• Use the Draw visible elements only graphics setting to reduce the amount of information drawn during view navigation. This will also optimize the speed when panning, zooming, and orbiting the model. See Options Dialog: Graphics Tab.