Jeff Kreines

If anything, it's slower. I expected 11.5 to be faster than 10.5, which it wasn't -- much much slower -- and 12 so far is even worse. I found that often a final render was faster than Open GL rendering! Outrageous. (All this on a Mac G5 dual processor machine.) And, A simple test I've done, has real strange errors in rendering. I drew a circle and rectangle, with some overlap, and extruded them. Filleted the edges. Chose a color. The color shows up in OpenGL rendering but it's gray in final. But in open GL the surfaces disappear, though they are there in final. Different rendering styles give different -- inconsistent -- results. This is very depressing. Then again, the interface is different enough that it probably won't be all that bad to switch to Solidworks, which I am -- sadly -- thinking of doing. VW 12 is just too slow, and not really optimized for mechanical design. Please fix it so I don't have to get a PC!

I just updated to 11.5.1 (OSX/Tiger on a G5 dual 2G) and it's like molasses. I can't do a flyover of a rendered drawing (open GL) -- it stops to render every time I move the cursor! The Object Info box loses the X-Y-Z coordinated whenever you go to certain kinds of 3D objects, which is just absurdly stupid. And I am having problems with corrupted files -- just lost a good 20 hours of work because the backupautosave, which was set, wasn't saving!). Do I have to go learn Solidworks? I'd rather stick here with VW, but this upgrade is a serious disaster. Slow and buggy. Another bug -- many objects disappear when rendering -- this is just ridiculous. Jeff Kreines Kinetta

I have a drawing that was supposed to be automatically backed up (but wasn't) that won't open -- trying to open it crashes VW mechanical 11.5 Mac (Tiger). What can I do to avoid losing about 20 hours of work! VW 11.5 is slow and buggy as hell... a real mess so far. I am very disappointed.

Aladino writes: "I want to understand how much the presence of a more powerful video card then my Radeon 9600 (es. 9800 or a x800) can influence the performances of 2D redrawing with VectorWorks 10.5.1 on my G5 DP 2.3." I recently upgraded to 11.5 (from 10.5) Mechanical, which I run on a G5 2 gig dual processor machine. I find it's painfully slow -- for example, if I render to Open GL, I can no longer do a real time flyaround -- it re-renders every time I move the cursor. It used to be very good, now it's so slow I'm stuck in wireframe all the time. What happened? Seems like someone screwed up some nicely optimized code when they tried to "fix" things. Do I need to abandon the Mac (which I've used since '84) for SolidWorks? Please fix this!

The new Object Info palette in 11.5 is driving me crazy. The second you convert an object to 3D (say, by extruding it) you lose the X-Y-Z coordinate information -- which, if you are trying to nudge an object into position, is REALLY IMPORTANT. Who is responsible for this change, and what were they thinking? This mandates an IMMEDIATE BUG FIX!!!!!