designMARK

Amen to Kevin's suggestion! Thank you all for the input - I truly love VW but am often frustrated at how slow it can be even on a top-end computer. I design in detail and love the artistic abilities within VW and therefore my designs become slooooow to work with. And yes, I keep layers off that are complex most of the time - but you still have to work on those layers... still have to create viewports... still have see how things look together. I've got a dual-core opteron at 2.0 ghz each (smoken by the way), 2 gig of DDR400 memory, a SATA raid0 setup as my primary drive, and an nVidia Geforce 6800 GTX with 256 meg of video memory and dual DVI ports connected to dual 19" lcd monitors. The system is three months old now and I love it, not a single system-wide crash the whole time (wish I could say the same for VW). Yet, I don't see a HUGE difference between this machine and my other two year old machine with an AMD Athlon 2400XP with one gig of ram and a two year old ATI radeon 9000 card. Now in other apps I see huge differences like photoshop and inDesign - but not in VW. I have been wondering if the video was the bottleneck but it seems not as I don't use VW for any opengl rendering and such - just very intricate, detailed landscape designs that really rival hand drawn stuff. Thanks again for your input...

Thank you JX1BR59, I hadn't considered a 3DLabs card. Is that company surviving? I'll look into where I can purchase one and how much they cost. Have you used non professional workstation graphics cards like a geforce/radeon type cards to notice the difference in VW?

I'm interested in speeding up VW if possible, and want to know what is the best, most tuned graphics card to accelerate VW on a PC. Does anyone know out there if there are specific nvidia/ati chipsets and driver versions that are better than others? Should I invest in a ATI FireGL card or nVidia Quadro version? SPECIFIC know-how in this area is appreciated...

Just thought I'd share my experience of late... I have a dual 19" LCD monitor setup both on DVI connectors. I have a high-end nVidia video card and was using the nvtools controls associated with dual monitor setups. I had constant lock-ups and freezes with version 12 - so much so I've been thinking of going back to version 9.5, which served me well for many years. However, just a few days ago I realized that when I turned off the nVidia tools, my problems went away (almost no VW12 crashes now). Having two monitors is FANTASTIC and I just can't go back now - one for working in and one for all your tool pallets, properties, resources, and layer manager! Was nice using the associated nVidia tools, but even nicer now that 12 is solid and usable.

Here are a few things I'd like to see: *The ability to control sketch-rendering by layer in viewports. Sketch is such a neat feature of VW; I like the look of some layers sketched (like plant material, hatches) and some un-sketched (like the house, property, etc). I know this controllable by layer on the design layers, but in a viewport its not - at least that I've found. *As I've said before in a post, I wish there was a way to deal with raster images differently. It is just so slow to draw/trace on-top of a raster image. Granted, my drawings get to be cumbersome due to my tendency to try to make them look hand drawn with lots of hatch/stipple - but even without that it is a slow process. I don't know much about the implementation of QuickTime to bring in images - but is there another way? I hate to compare since I do love VW, but in whatever way AutoCAD has created the implementation, it is much faster at rendering/dealing with images in the drawing space. I'm no software engineer, so I don't know if VW is just not compatible with another image rendering solution, or if it is just too cost prohibitive. *Speed ? Speed ? Speed while dealing with complex drawings. Could VW team up with a graphics card manufacturer and tune some drivers to make VW more optimized at re-draws, refreshes, panning, zooming, etc? I would pay several hundred at least because I would like to not only see it a little faster, but 500% faster. I know I?m dreaming, but from my experience working with VW on a couple different machines I don?t see VW perform markedly faster (as one could expect) on a computer that is say, two or three times faster than another (in terms of memory, CPU speed/cores, graphics card, etc). So, is the software the bottleneck? *Greater variety of tiles, hatches, stipples, and plant symbols specifically for Landscape Architects. VW has come a long way in this regard with the last couple of releases, but I still feel we all have to do so much customization and creation of our own. Though VW is great at allowing us to each be creative, it would be nice to have more to pick from a landscape point of view. Could NNA create a forum where we could exchange with each other and even see the work as a community meshed into the sample folders at install? Just a thought. *That NNA will continue to grow and prosper. I?m surprised at all the exposure VW has gotten over the last several years. When I started using 9.5 essentially nobody I spoke with had even heard of VW. Now, almost all the landscape architects I speak with have heard of and/or seen samples of VW landscape drawings. There is much respect and interest for the product out there. I don?t know how it is translating into sales, but if VW can continuously improve and be more robust, fast, and full-featured, its take of the AutoCAD market will continue.

Thank you for your reply - I'll download the update presently! The lack of tile has been such a thorn in my side! I'm glad its been addressed. Have a great day.

Den - I had the same problem and gave up and re-drew most of my symbols from scratch when I got 11.5. I wish I had better advice for you. The symbols I tried to use were actually converted to vector graphics from scans of hand drawn symbols and imported into VW- it really gave my drawings a hand drawn look. I went from 9.5 to 11.5 and the new plant tool wouldn't work with the symbols I had used for three years in 9.5.

Its been a long time since I've used this tech board - I used it regularly back when I first got 9.5. There was much more activity then. Does anyone else have the tile problem with 12? Or at least, can anyone confirm for me that it works with their installation? Thanks.

Hello Board, I'm a VectorWorks Landmark user since 9.5. Just got my upgrade not too long ago to 12. For some reason, I can't get tile to work anymore. I've installed my copy of landmark to my laptop and home computer just to test the tile function, and it does not work on any of the three. Vectorworks says it works as it processes the command, but... no tile. Does anyone have a workaround? Also, I enjoy tracing bitmap scans of preliminary design concepts and have done this with almost every design I do since I purchsed VW four years ago. With each release I hold my breath hoping working with large image files would get faster. Often, tracing a bitmap is painfully slow waiting for redraws with every pan, zoom, and drawing command. I now am the proud owner of a very fast dual-core opteron based system with raid, 2gigs of ram, high-end graphics card, etc - I can't hardly notice a difference dealing with bitmaps than my "old" 2.0 ghz machine with 512 megs of ram. In fact, I almost think V12 is slower than 11.5. Anyone have any ideas on how to speed the snail up? As a side note AutoCAD is smoking fast on my new machine... but I just love VW more... (frown). And lastly... I just got done "translating" an AutoCAD 2005 file. I can't believe how slow VW re-draws the file with every command - just as slow as working with a bitmap. I re-imported it no less than five times trying to work with different settings to speed it up. No dice. The file is not "huge" but did have over 30 layers and several blocks of trees, shrubs, and hatchs. But nothing major. Again, I swear 11.5 is faster at that as well. Any help there?

I think I once knew how to create a new ID Label that would place the fields I choose from the plant record categories. I Have created a new label using the others as a guide in the ID_Symbols.mcd and run the script to update the .txt file - When using the ID Label Tool it now shows my new label but it does not use data from the plant - it just lists the name of my label - what do I need to do to create a ID Label that shows the Quantity-Plant Legend-Size? Help?