I just installed Solidworks18 SP 5 on a Dell workstation equipped with two Xeon E5-2609 at 2.4 GHz 8 cores, 2 Nvidia Quadro 4000 cards and 128 GB of RAM. So a priori I expected to have honorable performances. I did a performance test with the SolidWorks utility and there I see a very average rating, even attachment. Is this normal? Would there be any SolidWorks or machine settings to optimize? In fact I don't see a big difference with another station equipped with a Xeon W3520 at 2.66GHz and an Nvidia Quadro FX3800 and 6 GB of RAM.
SW almost doesn't use multicores (except for the calculation of drawing views), moreover, I also believe that W7 doesn't support the multiprocessor, which explains why you have banal performance.
all in all I do not do too badly with my Windows 10 laptop, Intel Core I7 at 2.9 Ghz, my 16 GB of ram and my uncertified integrated graphics card (okay, I don't have the RealView but since I don't care it's not a big deal).
For renderings -so with Photoview 360- it's not Solidworks but an integrated version of MODO (foundry ex Luxology) which is a program written natively for multi-cores.
Also, "Visualize", available since 2018, is also multi-core, since it is an integration of Bunkspeed, which is also natively multi-core. The name to be changed but it's the same code with improved interfaces dedicated to SW and motion which is also an external code integrated into SW for a long time. (motion was formerly called Animator developed as a Peri, an add-on of SW by a volunteer programmer)
On the other hand, although you are not concerned (given your version of SW) you should know that in the 2019 version, SW has made a big effort on the code so that it uses the graphics card more but above all in an optimized way.
