New Mac?

[khumenny]

I need to upgrade my workstation and looking at a macbook pro with external monitor. Anyone out there have an opinion whether it's worth it to go for the top model with the M3 Max chip or is the M3 Pro enough for Vectorworks rendering, etc.?

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

I have the Mac Pro Laptop (new) M3 Chip, with external monitor.  I really like it.  I only have the 18 GB version and it seems to render fine.  If you are doing very heavy computational work, RAM is still a key player.  Th more the better.

 

 

 

 

[Pat Stanford]

It depends on what kind of drawing you are doing and how detailed and photorealistic you want to be.

 

If you are mostly doing Plans, then the Pro and 18 GB RAM is probably fine.

If you are doing simple models and rendering then Pro and 36GB is probably fine.

 

If you are doing high-end renders of complex/very large and you want near photorealistic in shortest time, the Max + as much RAM as you can afford is your best option.

 

I bit the bullet and went Max + 128GB RAM.  I still have a 10GB+ model that has run out of memory on multiple occasions.

 

HTH.

[E|FA]

Not exactly apples to apples (pun intended), but I'm seeing RAM issues with a 24MB M2 15" MacBook Air.  However, in addition to VW, I'm using Luna Display to drive a 27" iMac 5K display and often have too many tabs open in Safari, both of which are known to affect memory use.  If I could do it again, I would have bought a 36GB (min) MacBook Pro.