Ryan Russell Posted Monday at 06:56 PM Share Posted Monday at 06:56 PM With the announcement of the latest MacOS, Tahoe, can we expect/anticipate that the forthcoming version of VW will make use of the new rendering technologies, i.e. Metal 4 that will be integrated into the new release that can be used for rendering. Just curious as Apple has really seemed to fully integrate the physical design of the OS model so it is consistent from device to device. Also, is there any plan to ever have something Vectorworks residing on the iPad? 2 Quote Link to comment
Christiaan Posted Tuesday at 09:38 AM Share Posted Tuesday at 09:38 AM 14 hours ago, Ryan Russell said: Also, is there any plan to ever have something Vectorworks residing on the iPad? The new windowing system, menu bars and more accurate pointer in iPadOS 26 is certainly a step in the right direction, but many limitations still apply: Not enough RAM, I think 12 GB is the max an app can access on iPad App size limit of 4GB is too small The desktop app leans on AppKit, low-level POSIX functions, dlopen-style plug-ins and unrestricted Python, whereas iPadOS only ships UIKit/SwiftUI, forbids runtime‐loaded .dylib files and disallows JIT-compiled scripting–all of which break Vectorworks’ plug-in, Marionette and Python ecosystems. UI would need to be rewritten in UIKit/SwiftUI. User-installed plug-ins, Python pip modules and most third-party renderers wouldn't work. iPad apps live in a sandbox. Access to SMB/NFS shares, network licences and reference files outside the container (common on BIM projects) requires new open-in-place and cloud-drive workflows. USB dongles and FlexNet servers aren’t possible; the team would need an Apple-ID-based or subscription licence infrastructure. Even with 12 GB per process, complex Redshift or path-tracing jobs can peak higher. They’d have to off-load to a cloud render service or limit scene complexity. Long-running renders risk being suspended if the user switches away for too long; iPadOS background execution limits are far stricter than macOS. Vectorworks’ Metal renderer ports cleanly, but some VW plug-ins still expect OpenCL/CUDA on macOS and would need re-writes. 3 Quote Link to comment
Christiaan Posted Tuesday at 08:36 PM Share Posted Tuesday at 08:36 PM Some of this I got from ChatGPT, so I'd welcome any corrections if there are errors. Quote Link to comment
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