New Computer- Whats the most important?

[Assembly]

Looking at a new iMac.

What are the most important features for VW to run well.

I'm thinking:

As VW is not multi core, that is not so important.

More memory rather than Processor power.

How important is the graphics card?

[Kevin McAllister]

If you're running Renderworks, everything is important as it sees extra RAM and multiple cores.

For every day work in the design layers, the graphics card is important for OpenGL. As long as the graphics card has at least 1GB of video RAM you're probably good as most Apple graphics cards at that level are pretty powerful.

And eventually Vectorworks will be 64bit and multi core aware (there was an interview with NV and its supposed to appear in VW2013 or VW2014, clearly they missed VW2013).

Kevin

[P Retondo]

If you're working in 3d, in order of importance, processor speed (multi-core good for Renderworks), video card (speed and cache size), min 2GB RAM, 4 better.

[Jonathan Pickup]

nothing beats raw power, so the best processor you can afford, then as much RAM as you can afford, but watch out for the graphics card.

unless you are looking at one of the special apple laptops, you can add ram later, but its not always possible to upgrade the processor.

[grant_PD]

RAM and graphics card, send your files to VW cloud for processing power. And a nice, big, monitor.

[Assembly]

I'm pushing my VW on the BIM side. I get a lot of slow down in my files as I add more Viewports and Section VP's.

I find that the annotation part of a viewport changes as file size increases.

With Hidden Line Renders,

Small files maintain the hidden line render when entering annotation layer.

Large files revert back to wireframe.

I suspect this might be a memory issue?

So with large files I'm wondering if more memory is better.

Simply put is it the case that VW maxes out the memory, and when it does it has to do more processing?.

For the same money I could have a

2.9ghz, 512mb graphic, 32Gig memory

or

3.2ghz 1Gig Graphic 8 Gig Memory.

[Jonathan Pickup]

quad core or dual core?

[Jonathan Pickup]

512MB graphic is the minimum, so it would eventually have to be upgraded.

[Dieter @ DWorks]

The processor clock speed should be as high as possible as VW really rely on this! I have this out of own experience and it's somewhere in the VW documents with computer specs. Graphics card should be min 1GB, and 8GB of memory is more than enough.

Edited March 18, 2013 by DWorks

[P Retondo]

Go for the 3.2 GHz, mate. 8GB RAM might be more than VW can use at present, plus you can always add RAM later.

Are you really using vw2011? Major improvements in viewport update speed since then.

[Christiaan]

More RAM helps keep machine zippy with lots of other apps open though so VW itself isn't the only consideration.

[Assembly]

Are you really using vw2011? Major improvements in viewport update speed since then.

yep 2011

Given the higher spec requirements of VW2013, there is quite some cost to move the entire office up.

I know there is background rendering of VP's what else is there that increases the speed of vps?

Do your hidden line VPS stay hidden line when you edit the annotation?

[michaelk]

Do your hidden line VPS stay hidden line when you edit the annotation?

Probably a dumb question: Do you have Display Viewport Cache selected?

mk