DMcD

HA >>our office is planning to change to one of the big and really reliable cad software houses If it were only as easy as that. I tried switching and spent months with Solidworks and some days with Rhino and found that especially SW was more buggy and unreliable than VW with all sorts of limitations and tools that did not work. I agree that VW could do a lot better and offer more in the annual upgrades… I can't remember when there was a "must have" tool or release, but regrettably, I have not found something better. D

I wonder if this has something to do with your computer. We have Mojave on two Touch Bar type MacBook Pros with SP1 and Mojave. It totally fails. I also tried a downgrade to High Sierra which also fails as many have pointed out on Mac OS sites. If you actually work in VW for a living, I'd really suggest waiting to upgrade to Mojave. On the other hand, VW 2019 appears to work OK on a Mac Pro (2013). I say OK… I have had only one crash in 3 weeks but have all sorts of graphics problems which mean restarts and closing and reopening files. JC

I have been using 2019 on High Sierra OK but not on Mojave. I could not see if you stated your OS. That being said, there are some problems which were visible with 2018 which are still there but worse with 2019. The worst of these by far is the way that objects can disappear when you're trying to edit them. By this I mean that you can enter a group or symbol to edit it and either the object's control handles are not aligned with the entities in the object or the handles are visible or there's nothing visible at all and even doing a select all, shows nothing in the info pallet… yet when you exit the symbol or group, everything is back to normal. There are occasional work arounds… quitting and restarting, closing the drawing and reopening, selecting Unified View and deselecting, changing the view etc, but these work only occasionally. This is a huge time waster and the behaviour is worse with 2019 than 2018. I don't think this is a bug with the graphics card since it happens on laptops as well as desktops. So while I would not say that it's not worth upgrading to 2019 yet, I would avoid Mojave and 2019 like the plague for some time. Part of the reason for these problems is that Apple have deprecated OpenGL and it appears that VW relies fairly heavily on OpenGl and maybe have not done all the work necessary to make it fully compatible with the new OS. Yes, Apple have caused a lot of problems but not the problem of disappearing objects. D

Agreed. After dragging two laptops on an overseas trip, one with Mojave running emails and the other with High Sierra running VW 2019, I should remind myself to wait 6 months before installing any update for VW. The alternative is that VW gives Service Select members a 6 months free period and updates VW six months after each Apple upgrade. As software developers who use both VW and Mac OS, having one incompatible with the other is a nightmare. I updated a Mac running Mojave with the SP1 version of 2019 very unsuccessfully. The app loads but bombs instantly when opening anything, including creating a new empty drawing from VW's one template. The SP2 update better work OK! D

Hello Ref There was a problem with some Macs from three-four years ago where some video cards would give a massive speed hit. Frankly, I did not believe NNA's claims that the video card was a problem but after swapping video cards, the speedup was instantaneous and crashes stopped as well. The problem for me was that either I could not find an OK video card for one mac I had which resulted in a new computer. D

>But hey, don't get me wrong, vw2011 has improved. Maybe but the progress seems glacially slow. I can work in 2011 and apart from the new bugs, it's just like 2010. I can't find the killer features in 3D and still have to pay outside contractors to use Siemens stuff to do what I would like to be able to do myself. I'm also bewildered at how many bugs are not fixed? such as filleting and Compose. Compose ought to be great, but without a "fuzzy" input to join things which are not quite touching, it's almost useless. Chainmaker showed the way, but is broken in 2011. NNA are not alone. Most software these days seems to advance in terms of icons and packaging but not program content and functionality. Just as long as we keep upgrading. D

I've been doing machine design in VW for 16 years or more. Since MiniCAD 4 or thereabouts. I've flirted with other options such as ACAD, Rhino etc, but always returned to VW. The main reasons are: Speed. The VW environment is a lot faster to work in that others. I've found that you can design nice shapes in Rhino but it's really hard to redesign or reshape them compared with VW. Output. What's the end purpose of your drawings? Mine is normally to output parts for CNC machines. These are either 5 axis turning or milling centres. In most cases we're not really working in 3D or machining 5 axes continuously. For that reason, having full 3D facilities in VW isn't a drawback. Being able to simulate mechanisms isn't too much of a drama for us either, especially after watching an ACAD inventor simulation of an aircraft undercarriage at a trade show where the mechanism penetrated the fuselage side! Great video, useless as a working tool. Yes, it is worrying that NNA steams off into the sunset without a map that we can read, but this is no worse than most other software developers. We're as flies to gods. D

>As you said, it runs fine on your laptop, so there is something >going on with your MacPro. >Have you called Technical Support to >try and work through the problem? >Have you run Software Update to make sure >you really have the most current versions of all the drivers? The problem is a bit bigger than this. I neglected to say that I have two Mac Pros, one at work, the other at home. Similar specs except that one has a 8800GT video card and the other has something like a 7600. Both similar large screens. Initially, when the problems first occurred, I did all the normal things like starting in safe mode, rebooting as another (new) user with extensions off etc. However, the only thing which got the performance up to speed was using only the smaller monitor. So the problem is probably not the CPU. Add to that the fact that all other programs and VW13 run fine, and the finger is firmly pointed at VW14. I have the latest OS and updates on all computers. I have talked via email with some people at NNA and run some tests for them doing screen timings. I think there is an admission that there is a problem, but it appears to be a low priority. For me... if I get something intensive to work on, it is better to downgrade. DMcD

>I'm also experiencing significant slowness in 2009, seems to take forever to edit >groups, symbols, redraw the screen when zooming, panning, nudging... I updated >my graphics driver, no improvement there. I have no issues when opening the same >drawings in VW12. Ditto. Running VW 14 (2009) on a Mac Pro 2 x 2.8, OS 10.5.6, 4 GB RAM etc. and a 30" and 24" monitor. Runs like glue. As quoted above, nudging takes incredibly long. So long that the selection handles move seconds before the object redraws. As noted in some posts above, VW 13 runs fine and full speed on the same system. And when used on a laptop the performance is remarkably good. As noted in some quotes, I have turned off all the ant chappies on screen, so no "interactive" elements are used. Release 3 upgrade installed etc. etc. Still runs like glue. There are no drivers available for the graphics card since they are included with the OS. I can find no reference to any other slow downs to software other than VW. And this behaviour was noticed immediately after installing VW14. Is anyone else still getting this behaviour after installing the latest upgrade? Or is it just a few elitist folk with too many big screens? DMcD

VW 14 with the current (first or second upgrade) is slow for me too. Sloooow. Very very slow. In fact so slow that most of my drawing, especially dimensioning does not work at all. I made a funny video where I rapidly draw 6 rects. In 2008 the rects are drawn right off the mouse moves. In 2009, the rects take another 6 seconds to completely draw after the mouse has stopped moving. I have a Mac Pro Dual Core Xeon with 5 gigs of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT card at work. I have a similar but newer and higher spec version of the same thing at home, with a higher spec video card. Something GT, but probably desmo as well. I also run VW 2009 on an Intel Macbook Pro. The two Mac Pros are running two screens, one 30" and the other 23". It appears to be the screen size that causes the problems. VW 14 runs fine on the lapdog, and fine on the Mac Pro when only the 23" screen is attached. Change to the 30" screen and things go slow as glue again. Start without extensions etc in safe mode and things are even slower... so never mind about that. The point is, VW 13 (AKA 2008) is perfectly fast. It is only VW 14 which is unuseably slow. And I mean seriously unuseably slow. There's another post somewhere about speed where Sean F claims users enjoy a certain lag. For me, it is just like using a phone with a delay. The feedback circuits go wrong, and you can't talk. Hanging up is the only option. Which is what I am thinking of doing with 2009. Is this delay or slow speed a problem for others still, or is it something unusual about my configuration? DMcD Mac Pro 2.66 Xeon stuff NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT Desmo 30" and 23" Cinema displays. Mouse and keyboard.