Optimum Hardware Requirements

[land1]

I am in the process of updating the computer system in my office and have had many opinions on what hardware will be best for vectorworks, I currently run landmark 12.5.2 using renderworks but will upgrade to 2008 when available.

We do rendering for 3d presentations in final or artistic renderworks - takes a long time currently.

Can anyone give a definitive answer on how the software uses the hardware - will I benefit from a powerful graphics card (and if so what is best) or is the ram or processer more important.

[mclaugh]

In all versions prior to 2008, all rendering modes except OpenGL have been handled by the CPU rather than the GPU, so unless Nemetschek has changed the way rendering is handled in 2008, a more powerful graphics card may be of benefit in terms of screen updating/redraws/refreshes, including the speed at which a render/re-render appears on screen, but for non-OpenGL renders, it will have no effect on rendering times.

More RAM will likely allow you to do larger and more complex renders, but it will have negligible effect on rendering times. There are other benefits from maxing out RAM, but improved rendering time is not one of them.

[land1]

Thanks for that, the message I get is that ensuring I select a powerful cpu will provide me wit the most 'bang for buck'.

[wezelboy]

Don't skimp on memory though. If you don't have enough your computer will start swapping to disk- which is really slow. Then your processor doesn't matter.

[Pat Stanford]

If you can wait another day, there will be a new episode of the PodCAD podcast out and one of the things we tak about is graphic cards.

Pat