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Those will be something similar like my D700's which where basically super expensive W9000

in PC world. With some slight differences and much less power consumption.

And these and their name was exclusively for nMac Pro.

 

So there will be also any similar AMD Mobile Pro Card on the PC side. Maybe not yet because

of first 14 NM chip but at least soon.

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It is just a nice Laptop.

No fun to CAD on the display, so external Monitor, so I prefer a Workstation

and being immobile :)

 

The keyboard screen is nice. Like a 3DCon Enterprise. VW Icons instead of F-keys.

But could be built into any Apple Keyboard. And I'ld prefer to have that much bigger.

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2 hours ago, JimW said:

Now I've just noticed you are capped at 16GB max for the new MBPs... that's... yikes. It doesn't affect Vectorworks as much as the GPU choice does, but bleh.

 

@JimW- the 16GB max RAM is unchanged from the previous MBP model which was also 16GB, same as that Razer Blade.

 

Related to questions about minimum GPU VRAM requirements, do the Vw2017 Analytics show what is the most common GPU VRAM size installed across the Vw user base?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
14 hours ago, rDesign said:

 

@JimW- the 16GB max RAM is unchanged from the previous MBP model which was also 16GB, same as that Razer Blade.

 

The only option on the MBP is 16, you can upgrade even basic windows laptops to 32 and 64 these days.
 

14 hours ago, rDesign said:

Related to questions about minimum GPU VRAM requirements, do the Vw2017 Analytics show what is the most common GPU VRAM size installed across the Vw user base?


I can check this when I'm back in the office, the analytics tools only work internally and we are at an offsite meeting today. But yes we do track that and I've started using it for creating the minimum tech specs for Vectorworks recently.
 

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Here's some info on the Radeon processors - http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/27/amd-radeon-pro-graphics-macbook-pro/

 

@JimWYou've been quoting a lot of numbers and I'd like to know what they all mean for VW. How does RAM affect VW? How does VRAM affect VW?

 

I guess I'm curious because from a layman's point of view VW is one of the least efficient pieces of software I own. I have a bunch of processor cores that mostly go unused and the files are massively bloated. Models that are slow in VW are no problem for C4D, Rhino or Netfabb Studio to work with.

 

Kevin

 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

RAM is currently less important as long as you have "enough" which for now generally means 8GB minimum as long as you don't concurrently run other applications that gobble RAM, you need between 4 and 8 that Vectorworks can use on its own so 16 GB total for now is geberally perfectly fine. This may change mildly or significantly as more multiview stuff comes online, but I will detail those differences as they come.

 

VRAM is a different story, because we aren't very efficient and because we now offloaded work onto the GPU for most graphical display functions, VRAM is incredibly important.

 

Vectorworks can easily use pretty much all the VRAM you have and 4GB is the minimum to give a user a good experience. It will WORK with 2GB but nowhere near as smoothly. And going forward, VRAM is rapidly becoming much cheaper with modern cards starting out with 4GB and ranging all the way up to 12GB.

 

The efficiency improvements to go along with the power of the upgrades we have rolled out will keep coming, but it likely won't get feature videos or fanfare since it's behind the scenes. VGM is getting a bunch of tweaks already even in SPs to focus of quality of experience now rather than just getting the features functioning as is the main focus in initial release.

 

The main reason VRAM is so important this year is because users can't force development can go any fadter, but they can make informed hardware choices that will dramatically improve their experience.

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Thanks Jim. I'm not trying to be difficult, just trying to understand what's going on. The reality is if there's say 500k of VW users all who have extra cores, that's potentially millions of untapped cores of processing (both Mac and PC). As a Mac user (as the majority of VW users are), the accessibility of GPUs with higher levels of VRAM is clearly an issue in the short term. It may be easy for people in architecture to upgrade their systems fairly often but its much harder for people in the entertainment industry or small business/single license users. My whole ecosystem is Mac which is why I started out with Minicad/Vectorworks. I stuck with VW and Mac but now it seems like neither are sticking with me.....

 

As an aside, it seems my system only has 1GB of VRAM. Its never been a problem until VW2017.

 

My main machine is a laptop so I can go onsite (into the theatre) and still work. There are rumours of a Mac 5K display with an integrated GPU which may make all this moot.

 

Kevin

 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Well now as to the issues you are seeing, those are different, geometry not redrawing or flickering are both bugs and not expected symptoms of too little VRAM.

 

The "normal" and expected problem when working with too little VRAM is just slowness or sluggish response times for tool interaction. 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
On 10/27/2016 at 6:10 PM, rDesign said:

Related to questions about minimum GPU VRAM requirements, do the Vw2017 Analytics show what is the most common GPU VRAM size installed across the Vw user base?

 

Bah, currently I can pull the numbers but the numbers aren't clean. The problem being that for users whose machines have dual graphics cards (ie most MacBook Pros) it is possible that if graphics switching isn't set properly, the same machine will check in with the lame Intel card and then once the problem is fixed, the real Nvidia or AMD (Also called ATI in a lot of reports) GPU, giving us two entries for the same person, one with the crap card and one with the good one. So this gives us a picture but the Analytics team wants to do some work to take only the most recent entry from each report. Also, the reports I have set up for me just pull the card make/model for now, not the VRAM allotment. I've put in a request for a field to be added to my reports to give me specific VRAM numbers too.

Based on what I CAN pull right now related to VRAM/GPUs specifically from Mac user logs based on GPU make/model:

 

Average amount of VRAM for a Mac user of Vectorworks 2017: 2.1GB

Percentage of Mac users with 2GB of VRAM or greater: 33.5%

Percentage of Mac users with dedicated Nvidia or AMD GPUs: 78%

 

Mac types used:

 

Macbook Pro: 52.47%

Mac Pro: 18.10%

iMac: 16.08

Mac Mini: 8.58%

(The rest are all under 3% each of the total, MBs, MB airs, etc.)

 

What I really want going forward is a utility that when a user with inadequate hardware tries to launch the application; give them a detailed rundown of what they may want to consider upgrading on their machine or what they want to look for in a replacement machine, and also automatically offer to change certain quality and compatibility settings to give them the best possible experience on weaker hardware without them having to go searching for what's what.

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Thanks Jim! Those numbers are super interesting. Do you know what the average amount of VRAM is across all users Mac and Windows? Does the number go up when Windows machines are included? It seems most users of VW2017 on a Mac are basically at or below the recommended 2gb of VRAM.... you can also see the importance of the Macbook Pro in this equation......

 

KM

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

It goes down when you add Windows and don't filter by country. We have an semi-odd (odd in regards to metrics) situation in China and Japan where a huge number of users work in 2D only and use a small portion of Fundamentals on very old hardware, so for them it doesn't really affect anything. However, if I focus the analytics on just Windows users in the US, Canada and the UK then the average is pretty close to the Mac average at around 2.88GB VRAM. 

 

However, on the Windows side the groupings are much more split, since on Windows it's possible to have up to 12GB vRAM on the high end so that skews the average a bit, since on the Mac side the max is currently 4GB. This basically means that a higher percentage of Windows users are below the average, but since the Windows side is thousands of GPU options while the Mac is only a few dozen its harder for me to manually pull data from that at the moment.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...
11 minutes ago, JimW said:

I have the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar model at my desk today, if anyone has any specific questions for someone with their hands on it feel free to ask. Benchmarking and testing on it now.

 

I'd be curious how many different adaptor cables you use by the end of the day. The lack of ports was my main observation when they announced it. The Macbook Pro has been my go-to machine for years. I love them. I don't need the portability as much as I once did but I suspect my next machine will be one as well. I have no expectations from the touch bar and I am mostly interested in how it holds up performance wise with complex models.

 

You get to play with all the toys, don't you :D

 

Kevin

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

MacBook Pro 13,3 15" 

Intel Core i7 6820HQ - 4c 8t 2.7Ghz

Radeon Pro 455 - 2GB VRAM

16GB DDR3 RAM

 

A snippet of my larger chart showing the new model compared to the 2015 high end model MBP (What I currently use as a daily driver):

 

Computer Model Operating System CPU (Processor) CPU
Cores(c) / Threads(t)
Cinebench R15
CPU Score
Cinebench R15 CPU Score
Single Thread
GPU
(Graphics Card)
Cinebench R15 GPU Score OpenGL
Performance
(GPU Based)

MacBook Pro 13,3

15" Touch Bar

macOS 10.12.2 i7 6820HQ @ 2.7GHz 4c / 8t 706 146 Radeon Pro 455 80.13 Excellent

MacBook Pro 11,5

OS X 10.12.2 Core i7 4870HQ @ 2.5Ghz 4c / 8t 603 128 R9 370X 63.35 Good


My personal thoughts after a bit of use:

 

Keyboard/Trackpad:

The keyboard I think is an improvement over the keyboard in the 2015 MacBook Pro, however I like a clickier and less soft keyboard but this is very much a personal preference. I use a heavy duty mechanical keyboard at home that could wake the dead so I am pretty biased. Semi-related to the keyboard, I had thought the huge touchpad would constantly pick up my thumbs/wrists while going to type, but their hand detection seems very well thought out and robust, I never accidentally misclicked while attempting to type. The large trackpad itself seems a continuation of Apple's dominance in the multi touch trackpad field, works great and feels great, just a bigger version of the 2015 models it seems which I count as a good thing.

 

Processor: 

It's better than the previous model, but not by much. The benchmark results put it at a 16% bump and the few Renderworks speed tests I did here effectively confirm that. The single core benchmark (which gives you a vague idea of how fast the basic math/geometry calculation in Vectorworks will go, but less reliably than the rendering benchmark) is an improvement of about 10% which I did not notice in a few tests here one way or the other.

 

Connections:
I needed 3 adapters to work as I normally do, 2 to thunderbolt of external displays, USB-C to USB for my ethernet/USB dock. I also miss the magsafe power adapter, feels like a step back not having it anymore, I've kicked the power cable out of my laptop on at least 4 occasions and I'm sure I will again.

 

Graphics: 

The Radeon Pro 455 seems a decent step up from the Radeon M370X in general use in some heavy files and the benchmarks confirm this. About a 26% bump in performance rating the top GPU choice vs the previous top choice.

 

 

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1 hour ago, JimW said:

if anyone has any specific questions for someone with their hands on it feel free to ask.

 

How do you like the ESC key ?

 

Keyboard without stroke is said to be  ... ahm ... strange but a better haptic feedback at the end,

when typing accepted would help ?

 

The enormous touchpad, with palm detection, not disturbing. But haven't heard of someone who

liked or needed that size. So I expect further things in the future (like Pen input) ?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I keep stubbing my finger on ESC since I'm used to slapping it rapidly and having it be a physical key. It always works fine, but my finger is a bit sore now. I suspect one would get used to this in a few days, I likely won't work with it for that long however, it's going back to Engineering.

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7 hours ago, JimW said:

 

MacBook Pro 13,3 15" 

Intel Core i7 6820HQ - 4c 8t 2.7Ghz

Radeon Pro 455 - 2GB VRAM

16GB DDR3 RAM

 

Thanks for the info @JimW! It looks the like graphics hardware is a good step up and its not even the top end upgrade to the Radeon Pro 460 with 4GB VRAM. I wonder if anyone on the forum has that version and could be convinced to run Cinebench.....

 

Kevin

 

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7 hours ago, JimW said:

 

Computer Model Operating System CPU (Processor) CPU
Cores(c) / Threads(t)
Cinebench R15
CPU Score
Cinebench R15 CPU Score
Single Thread
GPU
(Graphics Card)
Cinebench R15 GPU Score OpenGL
Performance
(GPU Based)

MacBook Pro 13,3

15" Touch Bar

macOS 10.12.2 i7 6820HQ @ 2.7GHz 4c / 8t 706 146 Radeon Pro 455 80.13 Excellent

 

MacBook Pro 11,5

OS X 10.12.2 Core i7 4870HQ @ 2.5Ghz 4c / 8t 603 128 R9 370X 63.35 Good

 

 

I found a some comparison numbers online for the other two variations of the current Macbook Pro - Macbook Pro Cinebench GPL Scores. The Radeon Pro 450 (Lower) comes in at 71.51 and the Radeon Pro 460 (Higher) comes in at 87.14. It doesn't seem like the extra VRAM of the 460 affects performance that much..... not sure what that means.

 

KM

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