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How do you get Maximum performance for Vectorworks


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Hi, Does anyone have any suggestions on the ultimate performance machine for 3D rendering in vectorworks without the use of add on rendering programs. I have gone from a dual core PC with 4GB ram to a quad core i7 imac with 8GB ram. A big difference in speed & overall performance, however still struggles with large projects. I need a computer with ultra fast rendering speeds. There must be something out there that can cope with the power of VW, in terms of textures, lighting & 3D modelling. It is a bit of a let down creating something & then having to wait from half an hour to an hour on some jobs at the final rendering stage for a single viewport to render in final quality RW, havent even bothered trying radiosity, far too slow. I use alot of extrudes & the shapes are not that complex, Glass textures seem to chug away at the memory along with lighting Maybe im doing something wrong??

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hardware will never close the gap,

if you want speed, get art.lantis.

alternatively, reduce the number of

lights, crank all your rendering

settings down + incrementally work

them back up until you get a

compromise between speed + quality

that suits you

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The software is not written to take advantage of all the RAM that you have, so you can discount that.

If you are using anything other than raytracing, the software is also not written to take advantage of all of your cores. Shadow mapping only uses a single processor. I'm not sure about radiosity either.

I've found that rendering using batch rendering is the fastest way, as it doesn't render the file to your screen. Rendering to viewports, while allowing you to set the dpi, is the slowest.

Using as many symbols as you can will speed up your rendering time.

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Thanks for the feed back. I usually use 72 DPI on sheet layers but for projects that require high quality i bump it up to about 300. I try to use symbols where i can for duplicating an object several times. I will try batch render, something i never tried before, usually i take perspectives into viewports & render them in fQRW. Would an 8 core mac pro make much difference to rendering times as opposed to increasing RAM from 8GB to 16GB.

Cheers

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I am sure one of the Nemetschekians can sort us out on this.

I have been told that Renderworks uses multi-cores (CPU), and had thought the hidden line render might use the multi-core in VW2010, or maybe I was just hoping. Also just reading the Renderworks page, OpenGL uses the video card (GPU) and not the CPU, so a better video card should speed this up.

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BTW More RAM will only be helpful if you have a 64bit Operating System. Thinking about it, that may your biggest issue. I know when I used to work on Vista and XP, for my Quad Core machine that had 4GB of RAM, it could only really use around 2.5GB of actual RAM due to the limitations of Windows XP & Vista 32bit. (32 bit should be able to use up to 4GB). I hope with 8GB of RAM that you are running 64bit, as it will be a huge waste if not. Cheers.

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