Revit Running on Intel Mac

[AP23]

Well, I've just visited the Apple Store and the guy told me even, If get the a 3,06 GHz Macbook Pro with 8GB Ram and 256 GB SSD drive, running Revit or any other 3D applications will still result unsatisfiable performance for daily heavy use.

Looking for some hard evidence to back this up, I came across this recent article. http://www.jigsawcad.com/articles/ju...lications.aspx . It seems that the 3d acceleration on a virtual machine seems to the cause of the bad performance as it has to be emulated. The article mentioned a new feature called VT-D which lets you dedicate an entire graphics card to the virtual machine, which means you can run Revit on native speed. It's very unlikely that VMware is going to implement this feature in the next release coming out this month. But let's hope so. At least then I can justify my purchase of a MBP.

[wbi]

As long as the video card has DirectX, you should be fine. The only problem with XP it's not 64 bit. It you upgrade to Windows 7 64 bit and Revit 64, it will take advantage of the ram.

how do you check if your video card has DirectX? I have the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics card in my MBP.

[blads]

Since Autodesk officially supports Revit running on parallels and boot camp, my interest for a Macbook pro has grown again. Previously, I’ve owned the older 2007 Macbook pro 2.4Gz 4Gb ram, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT. It worked perfectly until Revit 2009 and vista 64 bit came out. Drives for vista 64 bit wasn’t supported at that time and the graphics card couldn’t handle Revit 2009. I had to sell it at the end.

I’ve been looking at the newest 17” Macbook Pro (3.06Ghz) so I assume things have improved since.

My questions:
Is Parallels at this point in time a viable option? Everyone is saying that bootcamp gives reasonable results compare to pc laptop but any VM is horrible when using heavy intensive 3d modelling software. I prefer not to use bootcamp.
Is 4 GB enough in parallels to run Revit and 3ds max simultaneously while running OSX.
How do you deal with the constant broken license issue? Has this been addressed.
Do you still need to allocate a certain amount of ram or can parallels automatically determine how much ram is need for each OS?
How does the graphics card perform especially compared to the Quadro FX 3700?

This probably wont help but...
I now only use Parallels (v4) and so far I've had no major problems

Don't know if 4Gb will be enuff, possibly not if you're planning on running Revit 64 - I have a min 8Gb (on the MBP) & 12 Gb on the MP

I dont know of any "constant broken license issue"

I'm unfamiliar with the FX3700 so I cannot compare

[david.kurtz]

This probably wont help but...
I dont know of any "constant broken license issue"

Re: Licensing
There should no longer be issues or special steps to take when using a "regular" Parallels 4.0.3848 VM and standalone licensing with Revit.
Note: If you are using Parallels to access your Boot Camp partition, it's best to install the OS in boot camp, upgrade it in Parallels, then install and Activate Revit. That should avoid having to reauthorize multiple times in most circumstances.

Re: RAM
I (personally) would opt to have more than 4gb of RAM on a regular PC if I was running Revit and 3DS concurrently and was concerned about memory performance.

Re: performance
The VM will be slower than if you used Boot Camp of course, the most noticeable is the display performance. You might consider installing windows via Boot Camp then using Parallels to access that partition as if it were a VM when in OS X. Now you have the convenience of the VM on OS X, and the performance of the Native OS vis Boot Camp when you must have it.

Re: Video card
I only tested the GeForce 8600M and the GeForce GT 120 so I'm not sure how it compares to the newer FX3700.

Hope this helps some.

[sultarc]

Anyone tried revit 2010 on a new imac 27" with the i7 processor and parallels 5?

[joao1143]

Same question put above, today is black friday!

[mark.98140]

Anyone tried revit 2010 on a new imac 27" with the i7 processor and parallels 5?

ditto this question... anyone have any knowledge on this scenario?

[cdsuggs]

Same question put above, today is black friday!

If you want it, just buy it. You know it will work great!

[ejburrell67787]

I have a recurring problem running RAC2009 on Parallels 4 build 4.0.3848.

Typing text in Revit the whole of Parallels freezes and the only way out is via > Virtual Machine > Stop. There is no response in Revit or in windows to Ctrl-Alt-Delete etc.

It seems to happen at random every now and then. (Perhaps when keyboard typing gets ahead of what is showing on screen but not too certain about that.)

Anyone had this issue and know what to do about it?

Cheers!

[sultarc]

I haven't seen this problem at all. However am now using Parallels 5. Maybe you should upgrade.