Aargh

Fortunately the CAD side of my work has been really light so haven't opened vectorworks in a couple of months, however I went to open it a couple of weeks back and discovered that 2017 doesn't work with OSX Mojave - what the hell?? I'm forced to upgrade to the latest version because Vectorworks can't keep up legacy support?? Now that I see that problems that were in 17 and persisted in 18 still haven't been fixed for 2019 I'm really looking for alternatives. I think the two most likely are either AutoCAD or running a separate boot of Windows and putting Solidworks on as we have a multiple user license of that here.

One workaround that I have found is to hold off on rendering / hiding lines / shading the viewport till the last possible instant before publishing your files. It appears that Vectorworks needs to refresh every viewport and re-render elements for every screen refresh. This means that for every instance of zooming (really easy to control on a magic mouse huh? questions why anyone would want a scroll wheel doesn't it /sarcasm), panning or changing of pages every viewport needs to refresh and rerender. This of course only works when you're first creating the file and doesn't help for any files that you are making revisions to. I'm seriously considering switching back to AutoCAD now I've found they do a Mac version

The biggest annoyance I have is that I'm working with some pretty simple 3D scenes with very few assets (small exhibition stands). I've previously used anything from Vectorworks 10, AutoCAD 2004 and up and Studio Max 7 and up and none of these programs have had an issue modelling and displaying these simple 3D scenes. Hidden line displays, openGL shading and even simple renders have all been able to be used for continuous 3D rotating, panning and general modelling operations on some pretty average computer hardware. Now I have a pretty decently specced work computer and Vectorworks '17 I get this slow and unresponsive modeller that struggles with even the most basic of operations.

I'm running on a Retina 5K iMac with 32G of RAM, i7 and an 8G Radeon Pro 580 and it is really slow too. Working with some very simple 3D plans and models, all drawn from scratch in the file so no external input issues but Vectorworks '17 is slower than using AutoCAD 2004 on my 8 year old laptop i7 at home. The system struggles with general modelling, hidden lines, shaded settings, and can't render in decent times.