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Hello

 

My office is offering to buy a new machine and we are MAC based. Would anyone have any suggestions on a new machine purchase? What to include in purchase, machine type or other advice?

 

One note: I bought the first version of the M1 iMac for myself last year and I'm not that impressed with the supposed speed upgrade. It lumbers along when I work with PDF's as sometimes we need to trace PDF site plans for Land Arch when we don't have a survey dwg.

 

Any advice would be much appreciated.

 

Thanks!

 

Daniel 

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How much memory did you get in your M1?  If you are working with big files, then probably not enough.

 

The only real option as of today if you want to stay with Mac if a Mac Studio, with and M1 Max or even the M1 Ultra. Very little has been optimized for the Ultra yet, but I expect to see things rolling out in the next 3 to 6 months that will make better use of it.

 

I am recommending 64GB of Ram as that seems to be the critical factor in performance right now.

 

If you can wait, I expect to see the next generation of the Mac Pro using some version of Apple Silicon rolled out at WWDC in June or before.

 

How often does your office replace hardware? I have always been of the theory that replacing middle of the road equipment every 18 months actually give you better overall performance than buying top of the line every 3 years.  And that for professional use anything over 3 years is costing yourself time and Monday due to lower performance.

 

HTH

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I think problem with early M1 Macs is just the max memory.

I most times exceed the 16 GB limits for larger projects and it lags terrible.

I think if I had 32 or better 64 GB memory, the M1 Mini would be still totally

ok for standard CAD and Modeling.

 

As Apple unfortunately, at least so far, does no more offer a large iMac,

for now you have to go with either a Macbook Pro and external Monitor(s)

or a Studio.

I think even M1 Pro is OK for VW work. M1 Max of course but does not

offer much more than more memory.

But I personally would better go with 64 GB memory to be on the save side

for some coming years - so M1 Max, in a MBP or a Studio.

 

(Ultra isn't worth the double price in my opinion)

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18 hours ago, zoomer said:

(Ultra isn't worth the double price in my opinion)

I've seen quite a few benchmarking videos that support this view, showing that the doubling of cores often doesn't equate to double the performance (for various reasons, mostly to do with software optimisation). But these are all generally video editing benchmarks.

 

What they don't tell us is how soon we'd run out of RAM in Vectorworks and how much that extra RAM contributes to general stability in Vectorworks.

 

I think one of the best decisions I ever made when purchasing computers for Vectorworks was maxing out the RAM of our iMacs to 128 GB. I use more than 64GB RAM every day and sometimes max out to 128 GB. So for me, even with Apple Silicon, I think 128 GB needs to be the minimum RAM, so therefore a M1 Ultra or better.

Edited by Christiaan
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7 hours ago, Christiaan said:

What they don't tell us is how soon we'd run out of RAM in Vectorworks and how much that extra RAM contributes to general stability in Vectorworks.

 

 

Yes, I don't know either.

As there are currently some messages about VW memory leaks,

more shared memory may not help against it and maybe not in

general, if it is not used like the Ultra's additional GPU cores

in benchmarks.

Also because these of my problematic projects do not run reasonably

well on my unlimited PC either, in any of my CAD Apps.

(I think there is so much room for optimization in any CAD or 3D App's

data handling in general)

 

Also for the non 3D Apple ARM Benchmarks, OK, Lightroom usually exports

faster with more RAM and more memory allows a bit more Logic tracks,

but early M1 tests did not show any problems with only 8 vs 16 GB RAM

and swap. Just that a few of the 30 browser tabs needed reloading when

switching between.

But when my M1 Mini 16 GB shows yellow brownish memory pressure in

activity monitor, it is laggy and no more fun to use.

 

So I would not exclude VW own bottlenecks and early ARM optimization issues.

But when we can clearly see in Studio Benchmarks, that the, not well performing,

GPU cores also idle half of the time and are underclocked - and the reason would

really be a hardware issue, that the cache is too small and overflows - and the

only workaround would be to rewrite your App for Apple ARM to make use of its

(basically great) tiled memory ....

I am pretty sure that this software adoption will unlikely happen during the next

2 years, or ever, for most cross platform Apps.

 

So for the near future, for me, the Studio Ultra is a real disappointment.

Although I would love access to the double CPU cores and and 128 GB memory

option.

 

So again waiting for a reasonable Apple 3D machine. Waiting for WWDC and what

direction and options a non affordable Mac Pro may show or if M2 will avoid such

performance issues or possible gets just more RAM that I can buy another

interims Mac until a final "Cheese Grater" level machine will be available.

(Which I basically wait for since 2012)

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On 4/20/2022 at 8:39 PM, Pat Stanford said:

How often does your office replace hardware? I have always been of the theory that replacing middle of the road equipment every 18 months actually give you better overall performance than buying top of the line every 3 years.  And that for professional use anything over 3 years is costing yourself time and Monday due to lower performance.

In my opinion this depends on what one is doing.

 

For purely CAD drafting purposes my experiences is that this is not really the case because most things in CAD are still single core and performance in that area is often increasingly marginally across a few years and then a noticeable jump every few years like with the 12th gen Intel processors compared to the three or four generations before it. So over a few years it probably evens out in the end as the user is often the more limiting factor in that case than the hardware.

 

When it comes to rendering that is (mostly or only) CPU based I agree with your theory if one is rendering a lot because there has been more progress in multicore performance than in single core performance.

 

For working with really large documents and files a lot, regardless of rendering, a three (max four) year period makes sense for replacing hardware, as that often coincides with a performance jump with processors. For more moderate demands a 5-6 year period could be ok if rendering is not a major part of one's workflow and the hardware specs are suffient (i.e. not a low(er) end machine). Then increasing RAM or replacing the GPU might be a more cost effective option in the meantime.

 

This of course depending on how much the CAD software's resource needs increase is developing over that period of time.

 

One of the things stopping me from returning to Apple is their tendency to limit users to upgrade some hardware components themselves (e.g. adding RAM or replace a drive with a larger one) except for their most expensive machines so you have to use whatever is offered within budget and hope it will be sufficient.

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On 4/21/2022 at 10:51 PM, zoomer said:

So again waiting for a reasonable Apple 3D machine. Waiting for WWDC and what

direction and options a non affordable Mac Pro may show or if M2 will avoid such

performance issues or possible gets just more RAM that I can buy another

interims Mac until a final "Cheese Grater" level machine will be available.

(Which I basically wait for since 2012)

As mentioned in my other reply, this is one of the reasons why I don't see muself going back to Mac in the foreseeable future.

I miss those days where the user could at least upgrade RAM and harddrives themselves in a relatively easy way for non top of the line machines (e.g. the Mac II series, it's that long ago even though those were not exactly budget machine either but comparatively speaking at least not that hyper expensive as the current top level machines).

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I prefer working on Mac over Windows.

(and I think Apple ARM is the way to go)

 

Nevertheless, so far it looks like Apple still has to do some homework

for Apple ARM already after 2 years  of announcement.

And it looks like there is much need of mandatory adaptions from

software (cross platform) developers, that maybe will not happen after all.

 

I think Apple has to catch up a lot after neglecting the 3DCC community

for a decade. 

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