Vectorworks PC Build Suggestions

[Tanner Shelton]

Hello Everyone,

 

I work currently on an older Mac Pro early 2013. We are going to upgrade my machine to a newer PC build and I was looking to see if I could get some suggestions on what parts would be suitable. I do mostly event design and rendering and will soon be using vision as well. We set up the lighting and everything in Vectorworks so we can create realistic visualizations for our customers. So first off, Is there any major difference in software or support if I use Windows instead of Mac?

 

For the build, I am thinking of maybe a NVIDIA GeForce 2080 Super (8GB). And an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (The new 12 core processor) and 32GB of RAM. And an SSD for sure. Let me know if this is shooting too high or too low with what I want to be able to do with it. 

 

The current Mac Pro I work on is a 3.5 6 core intel xeon E5 with 32 gb of ram and an AMD Fire Pro D700 6 GB and it has been working pretty good but it does take a while to respond on occasion when working on a large plan.

 

Thank you!

[LarryO]

A few things you may notice when migrating to VW on the Win10 from MacOS is text input functionality.

1. With caps lock on, holding shift key will drop to lower case for the western alphabet on Win10.

2. Keyboard sequences for entering certain accents, Greek and mathematical characters are now relegated to "Alt" based index calls to the active font table.

3. Win10 has not licensed complete fonts sets like the MacOS. So in Ariel font for instance you cannot call up the checkmark and others. Finding pi can be difficult etc.

4. After changing a class or entering a value into a text field via the info palette control is not transferred back to the main drawing window. This blocks the single character shortcut keys. So you will frequently find yourself having to press escape or clicking on the drawing window before you can initiate another tool or function via the keyboard.

5. Many keyboards developed for Win10 have extra keys between the control and alt keys that get in the way of one handed shortcuts. Those with smaller fingers can experience painful stretching exercises to active certain sequences. I am always hitting the contextual menu button with my left hand's thumb when trying to group or ungroup items.

VW may not respond quickly enough to shut down requests from the WinOS resulting in stalled shut downs.

My switch over to PC from a similar arrangement MacPro circa 2011 as yours resulted in greatly improved rendering times and screen redraws of 3d and pdf objects. No more having to go get a coffee while waiting for viewports to regenerate. I occasionally get artifacts in the printing process that are not there on screen like a diagonal line across the face of a rectangular steel tubing.

We have been purchasing HP Z8 workstations with Xeon processors. This is not to say that these are better than other product configurations though. They were simply recommended by an IT consultant of business systems that we hired who installs and resells HP and Microsoft systems.

 

[herbieherb]

The NVIDIA GeForce 2080 Super (8GB) might be a bit too expensive for the performance boost in Vectorworks if you don't want to work on multiple 4k monitors. The processor is certainly a good choice if you also want to render on the computer with Renderworks from time to time. I would save some money on the graphics card and "only" install a 2070 Super. Therefore I would invest in a M.2 SSD as potent as possible, e.g. a Samsung SSD 970 Pro. You will notice this every time you save the file. Normally every SSD is so fast that the normal user doesn't notice any difference. But with Vectorworks, depending on the backup setting, the hard drive processes a GB of data every few minutes.

Edited November 13, 2019 by herbieherb