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iMac Pro information


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  • 2 weeks later...
  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
24 minutes ago, Allen Brown said:

Updated to macOS 10.13.4 and have been using VectorWorks 2018 SP3 on my iMac Pro all day. Hasn't crashed once! 

 


If anyone else reading can confirm this on their machine as well, please let me know! We will be testing the inhouse one today too.

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I've now updated to 10.13.4, and Vectorworks crashed within about 15 seconds after rendering a model in OpenGL and orbiting around it.

 

My experience has been that it's the combination of OpenGL and Orbit that causes Vectorworks to crash.  Often, the crash is well after I'm done with OpenGL.

 

For the past two days (before 10.13.4), I did use OpenGL some, though sparingly, and I'm pretty sure that I did not use Orbit in conjunction with it.  Instead, I went to wireframe view to orbit about.  Vectorworks did not crash either day.  OpenGL and Zoom does not seem to be a problem.  VWIS121

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Jim W. rumors are flying about a possible change to the Mac CPU infrastructure (i.e. a new chip made by Apple) and a transition away from Intel-based designs. Obviously this would require a reworking of the Mac VW version. Any in-house discussions of this that would be interesting to us naifs outside the building?

 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
Just now, DanJansenson said:

Any in-house discussions of this that would be interesting to us naifs outside the building?

 


So far no, we have no additional specifics other than the semi-rumors going around now. Engineering is waiting on more info as well. It'll also depend on if they switch over the entire line or simply offer them for the lower end or long-battery-life-minded products like the Macbook Air, which I would assume is what they would do since it would be incredibly hard for them to match Intel CPU performance numbers in such a short time.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...
  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I've been using the beta of 10.13.5 on an iMac Pro now for weeks and I have not seen the crash related to the GPU driver so far. Apple could of course alter this before it goes live but so far it seems very promising.

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Looking at purchasing in iMac Pro, mainly to run Vectorworks 2018.

Small to medium architecture projects, but doing BIM, often combined wiht scanned sketches etc, so we often have very large file sizes (200-400MB) and slow performance on our iMacs, particularly in 3D and when entering viewports. So I am trying to figure out the best combination for our purposes. Thinking of an iMac Pro with

- Vega 64 with 16 GB Graphics

- RAM - unsure, tending toward 64 GB. Is it worth it ? Or would there be a dramatic difference even going towards 128 GB? 

- Cores : Seems that the more cores, the lesser the clock speed is on the iMac pro? And what does the turbo mean? So I am thinking :

either the 8core 3.2GHz Xeon with turbo boost up to 4.2 GHz, 

- or the 10 core 3.0 GHz Xeon with turbo boost up to 4.5 GHz . What would give better performance with Vectorworks ? Is it worth spending the extra $800 on the 10 cores? 

Really trying to find the best value for money in this and making sure I set the right priorities where the money goes :-) 

Would love some comments from people who know more about this (or have purchased something similar) than I do !

Thanks

Marc

 

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Hi @markymarc 

I bought the iMac pro 3,2 Ghz / 32 GB and the pro vega 64 graphic card. Except for the crashes it is performing very well. The os 10.13.5 will fix that. I don't have any comparison  what more cores mean in day to day work, but compared to my old 6 core Mac Pro 2010 everything is smother and faster. And the screen is fantastic. 

 

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If you don't do RW Rendering, which will use every core/hyperhread available,

you should not look for many cores.

Typical CAD is hard to split for multithreading and still runs mostly on a single core only.

There may be certain tasks that can be splitted in the future and profit from more than 1 core

but that may mean 2-4 cores only.

So theoretically a CPU with highest single core speed will be your best choice.

(which are standard i7 and i9 CPUs over Xeons, so the standard iMac is a bit faster)

 

The 10 core Xeon W in iMac Pro has the fastest (single core) turbo clock speed of all

so it is the sweet spot for most users. If you can afford the upgrade, go for the 10 core.

 

The Vega 64 has its price and is slightly faster than the 56 but is has double VRAM.

(More VRAM than needed will not accelerate anything,

but you will need enough VRAM that your data fits in)

As the iMac Pro is not a bargain and not upgradeable , it is more an investment in the future

to keep it running longer. Currently you may not see much acceleration over the Vega 56.

You could also think of using external GPUs to upgrade later but not everyone likes an extra

case with its own noise.

And in VW there are currently some other bottlenecks in 2D Views so that it will not help

if you throw more GPU power on it. But these may be finally addressed in the future and

GPU becomes more and more important in the future anyway.

 

Same for RAM,

more than you need does not help, you just need enough of it.

You may not profit now but if you will run such an expensive, hardly expandable device over

8 years it may be nice to already have it.

My projects hardly ever need more than 8 GB RAM, so currently 16 GB may be enough and

32 GB overkill but you will need more RAM for running other Apps beside VW anyway.

My last nMac Pro in 2015 had 32 expensive GB, so for the next Machine I would go at least

64 GB, although I still don't run into any limits :)

Currently RAM and GPUs (crypto miners) are very expensive, so bringing it to service to upgrade

RAM later when cheaper again may be or not be an option..

Edited by zoomer
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
14 hours ago, markymarc said:

Small to medium architecture projects, but doing BIM, often combined wiht scanned sketches etc, so we often have very large file sizes (200-400MB) and slow performance on our iMacs, particularly in 3D and when entering viewports. So I am trying to figure out the best combination for our purposes. Thinking of an iMac Pro with


as a few mentioned above, the CPU cores are for Renderworks renderings and if those are not a large part of your wrkflow and you don't expect them to become part of it during the life of this machine, then the extra cash for the 10core model is most likely not necessary in your case. Either of the GPU options on the iMac pro are excellent choices for large and complex models and as development moves more of Vectorworks onto the GPU, you will likely notice improvements more and more as versions progress.

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