MacBook Pro with Retina Display

[Kevin McAllister]

Is anyone out there using VW2012 or VW2013 on a MacBook Pro with a Retina Display? I'm starting to think about replacing my aging Mac laptop and was curious if anyone has any first hand experience with how it performs.

Also, does anyone know if VW2013 has been tweaked to take full advantage of the Retina Display at full resolution?

Thanks,

Kevin

[IanH]

I'm interested in this too as I'm not convinced by usefulness of retina display in Mac, unlike iPad.

I'm actually a registered Apple iOS developer so have to consider retina display in iOS devices. But it's fairly straight forward as from the programming perspective, a normal iOS device display and a retina display have exactly the same resolution. Where the double resolution of a retina display can be accessed is via iOS filling in the blanks, such as rescaling images at higher resolution to fit or generating smoother text or lines. The only control that developer has over this is to specify their own 2x higher resolution images which will be used instead of iOS rescaling an existing image - you postfix your image or icon filename with @2x and your app is retina aware with iOS automatically using the higher resolution (@2x) image instead of the lower resolution version.

On an iPad this works well, as most items on screen are text, lines or images that do look better at 2x scaling factor. But *if* retina on OSX works the same, which I think it probably does by looking at display controls on a retina displayed Mac, I'm not convinced how useful it will be for an app such as Vectorworks.

The problem is that as far as VW is concerned, the resolution of normal and retina display will remain the same. It doesn't suddenly have 2880x1800 addressable resolution to play with instead of 1440x900. It still thinks its 1440x900 and all retina display does is smooth images, icons and lines.

If this is the case, then my 17" MBP with 1920x1200 on a larger display is better option for me. Even that resolution is too small for my ageing eyes and external monitor helps greatly. RIP 17" MBP, for me, perfect size. Not sure if performance trade off of non 2x modes will affect VW performance in new rMBP making the non native resolutions workable on the smaller 15" display.

IMHO

[Kevin McAllister]

Thanks Ian. I am mostly curious about graphics performance while using Vectorworks.

It sounds like the advantage to having an application updated for the retina display is that none of the graphics performance is used to constantly rescale the a application graphics.

A lot of the time I use my laptop attached to my Cinema Display anyway. If Apple had done a proper update to the Mac Pro I would probably be looking at a desktop machine instead.

Kevin

[braith]

I'm running VW 2012 on a new Retina macbook Pro. As mentioned above VW can't take advantage of the increased resolution until it's updated to do so. For now each pixel is "double pixeled". Besides that though I haven't run into any issues.

braith

Architect

[Jake DeGroot]

Any tried VW2013? Has it been updated to fully support the expanded resolution of the retina display?

[JasonWD]

I'm now using a Retina 15" with VW2010 using a utility called 'Pupil'

http://pupil.io

This allows you to run the display at anything up to the native 3840x2400 resolution and switch on the fly,

At the moment I run it at 2880x1800 (whilst wearing glasses!) because anything higher just makes it incredibly difficult to see.

It's great!

[JasonWD]

I'm now trying out VW2013 but, with respect to the display, it is exactly the same as 2010. No point in me upgrading until this is addressed.

[Cadplan Architecture]

I use VWD2011 on a MBPR 15" linked a Thunderbolt screen in the office & on it's own at home. I'm really happy with it and would highly recommend.