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Best PC to run Vectorworks 18 on


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  • 4 weeks later...

I've had a run of part upgrades to try and get something that has the best of both worlds in terms of 2d & openGL performance, render speed and stability. I use a iMac on and off and it just seems way more stable.. but there's not much to pick from for fast rendering...

Anyho, I built a water cooledAMD 1920X Threadripper 12 core ( my shop ran out of 16 core  versions at the time)  OC'd to 3.9ghz (would crash during high res renders at 4.0ghz !), Corsair H115i AIO, 32 gb Ram and a GTX1080 Ti and the thing absolutely flies and is mostly stable - I think the main issues now are around Windoor as adding or eydropping a door/window every now and again will make VW vanish. At its stock clock speed it was noticeably glitchy on good perf and compatibility - but once OC'd it flew - these CPU's are dead easy to OC as well..

Edited by Aspect_Design
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  • 1 month later...
On 7/10/2018 at 7:43 AM, Maryradford58 said:

I'm an architect and have used this program for many years. My PC's have never run the program efficiently. I am purchasing a new laptop and want to make sure I get the best possible computer for this program. Please advise ASAP. Thanks!. 

Dear Maryradford58,

 

I'm an interior designer.  We've been on VW for a few years, now.  We purchased a Mac Pro with a whole lot of hardware behind it and, I'm sorry to say, it doesn't seem to be particularly good with VW, either.  As I've told the VW team, sometimes I have to push a key 3 or 4 times for a command to register; my models get painfully slow (even on a residential project, which--compared to all the big examples that get shown in the videos--should be a tiny scope for VW to handle), and there are bugs that lose work both with and without crashing.  

 

If you find the magic bullet, please share it with me.  I'm currently re-doing 2 full days worth of work that vanished, suddenly.  Fun times!  Happy drafting.

 

Rafi

 

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On 8/2/2018 at 9:29 PM, Aspect_Design said:

I've had a run of part upgrades to try and get something that has the best of both worlds in terms of 2d & openGL performance, render speed and stability. I use a iMac on and off and it just seems way more stable.. but there's not much to pick from for fast rendering...

Anyho, I built a water cooledAMD 1920X Threadripper 12 core ( my shop ran out of 16 core  versions at the time)  OC'd to 3.9ghz (would crash during high res renders at 4.0ghz !), Corsair H115i AIO, 32 gb Ram and a GTX1080 Ti and the thing absolutely flies and is mostly stable - I think the main issues now are around Windoor as adding or eydropping a door/window every now and again will make VW vanish. At its stock clock speed it was noticeably glitchy on good perf and compatibility - but once OC'd it flew - these CPU's are dead easy to OC as well..

Thank you so much for telling us (all) that.  I had been wondering what if something like what you are saying would fix problems I am experiencing (Mac Pro, 3.7 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5, 32 GB 1866 MHz DDR3, AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB video); sounds like not.  I'm toast if I try to run VW and Google Chrome at the same time. 

 

 

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You are talking about the nMac Pro from 2013.

I have the 6 core D700 and I think it is still a decent and silent "Workstation"

for Vectorworks CAD and BIM work.

Of course our D700s are 5 year old legacy and I think even an outdated

1080 without Ti is double as fast but our 6 GB VRAM should still be able to

handle large VW Models.

Also a current Macbook Pro's mobile CPU meanwhile is faster than our CPU's

and our at-that-time very fast PCI SSD is eaten by nowadays 3 times faster

Macbook Pro SSDs.

 

I had no problems with OpenGL and Design Layer Views in 3D and find it

rather snappy compared to some other Apps.

Until VW 2018 everything related to Layout Layers and Viewports was slow

and bottlenecked but the problem was not our hardware.

All that should be much more snappy with VW 2019 2D GPU hardware

acceleration.

 

I think same things can still slow things down and that is complex PDF

underlays (and maybe referenced 2D Design Layer Viewports ?)

 

So beside the hardware,

current iMacs and iMac Pros should be still very suitable for VW, even

Macbook Pros with dedicated GPUs,

it would be worth to look at individual projects and workloads if there

are any possible workflow improvements possible.

Like making use of Symbols, cleaning up geometry from imported or

library Symbols and such things that you already may be familiar with.

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