Hi Dexter :)

Well there's all kinds of possibilities here- and some (most) of them may not be CU/ViaCAD's fault. Like the Mac hardware- especially the graphics card. It's interesting that Apple have recently dropped all of its support for ATI cards in recent models. Those cards may just not be up for 3D work, because as you know, most CAD developers, sadly, are Microsoft only. Having said that, I do get video drop-out problems with Solidworks running in bootcamp. I'd blame that on bad drivers (and a card that windows doesn't like very much).

But ViaCAD/ CU does look a lot better under OSX than it does under XP, and the same for Solidworks e-Drawings on OSX too. Solidworks on XP is quite rough, unless you turn the performance slider up (and even then, there isn't much improvement). However the CPU fan goes wild on this Macbook Pro while working in Bootcamp when running SW. Oddly enough, I think the Parallels virtual drivers are much better than Apple's own Bootcamp ones!

It's early days, and I'm confident that it won't be long before we see Solidworks on Mac (I mean, Rhino is now being released as a UB beta, and after all that fuss on their front page about telling Mac users to 'shut-up and get a PC'? hehe! Siemens/ UGS have also announced that they are committed to porting all their software to multiplatform- including Mac. I do hope that this also means Solid Edge too. So in the end, it is early days yet (pardon the contradiction and bad english there!), and I would imagine that there are even more performance surprises for our beloved platform :)

Another issue could plainly be that the Spatial kernel started life as windows-only, then got ported to Mac (I think on Apple's request?). It still may have problems that need ironing out. I don't know.

It's worth getting a copy of the freeware utility Onyx and buying a copy of Diskwarrior too. Both these apps help keep the computer in trim.

Tom.

PS are you in England, Europe or somewhere else? America etc? Just curious.

The sad truth is that Mac graphics performance is pathetic.

At one point I gave up on running large complex models on a mac and moved to a PC with a mid level (at the time) gaming card. The difference was like night and day, everything was smooth and fluid on the PC, while the Mac would wait a second then jerkily overshoot where I wanted to go.

Before moving last year from a PPC to Intel I went to the local Apple store, where they let me install CU and run tests on everything from a MacBook to the MacPro. Performance was very variable. Obviously the MacBook with its integrated GMA graphics was at the bottom of the list, and the MacPro with ATI 1900 was top of the list. The iMacs performed better than the MacBookPro's, but for some operations, all but the ATI 1900 were outdone by a two year old nVidia 5900 on a PC. To make sure that all my tests were accurate I normalized the CU window to about 1280 X 900.

The explanation has always been that the graphics cards drivers written by ATI and Nvidia are just not very good, and Apples implementation of OpenGL has some huge performance problems. Put the two together and you get the awful state of Mac 3D graphics that we have been living with for the last ten years.

Sadly if you want decent graphics performance for CAD or games, the only choice is a PC.

Okay. Agreed. It judders :eek:

However, save 'assembly.cu' (or in my case .vc) as a DWG file, then re-open in Solidworks e-drawings for Mac, the results are simply stunning when the model is rotated. I really do think e-drawings on the Mac looks better than anything I've seen on the PC.

I really DO hope that Solidworks is eventually released for the Mac- even though I have a legit copy on XP on 'the dark side' of this Mac. I haven't yet tried UGS Solid Edge and despite ViaCAD being mindblowing at that price, I still use SW 99.9% of the time, because it's so easy to use- and I'm pretty quick with it too. Making new planes in VC is really doing my head in :(

I think SW uses Hoops !?

Looks like you're right...here's one link (many pop up in Google):

http://www.hoops3d.com/customers/index.html#solidworks

me neither (not so sure). I recently had a very similar discussion concerning the Mac graphics capabilities on another forum with a chap who had recently 'switched' from PC to Mac, but he was basing his arguement on those stats that indicate which (graphics) card is faster than that card. Again, running e-Drawings on Mac shows a far different story. I've recently downloaded Bootcamp 1.3 and Apple have got the drivers just right. I too am using fairly complex assemblies and the MBP graphics performance is second to none- despite the SW site not recommending the Radeon X1600 card.

Why on earth would Apple make the drivers worse for Mac OSX than Microsoft XP? It doesn't make any sense. So I'm really going with Jol's definition here, as I think it really is down to lazy coding carried out by developers and not actually Apple after all. For eg, take a look at Cheetah 3D (http://www.cheetah3d.com/about_3.php)- that rendering and 3D animation is amazing! But Cheetah, AFAIK, is only made for OSX.