Has anyone tried running Autocad and/or 3D Studio Max under parallels on a Mac? I'm interested in the possibility of running these apps using virtualisation, but suspect performance would be poor. TIA
Haven't tried AutoCAD or 3D Studio Max, but I am running Concepts Unlimited (CU) on Parallels on a daily basis, and the speed is very good. CU is a 3D Solid and Surface Modelling software and it uses the Lightworks rendering engine. CU has both Mac and PC versions, but the Mac version is still not Universal. So at the moment, to run CU on a Mac, it is actually MUCH faster to run it through Parallels Desktop. Also, I have seen ProEngineer being run on Parallels, and it seem to work fine as well. Cheers.
AutoCAD 2005 I'm running AutoCAD 2005 on a Mac Pro 2.66 with 2GB RAM, 1024 assigned to Parallels and it flies! Faster than my 3GHz Pentium 4 at work! My 2 penneth worth ....
Do you also experience pointer sticking when moving from the menus back to the drawing area? I have to turn off mouse syncro in Parallels Tools in order to keep it from happening. It really drives me crazy having a mouse pointer stuck on my crosshairs all the time. If I'm giong to be using it for any extended time, I boot into Windows via Boot Camp.
Answering my own question here. AutoCad 2004 and 3D Studio Max 8 both work in parallels. I haven't had a chance to test them thoroughly but you can certainly run them, work in them and save and open files. 3DS Max is a little slow, as you would expect, and clearly benefits from running on a proper hardware platform rather than a virtual machine, but it works.
AutoCAD 2004 works for me too, but only if acceleration is set to Normal, otherwise Windows crashes on AutoCAD launch. Have you been able to run AutoCAD 2004 with acceleration set to High? If so, what Mac are you using? (Mac Pro, 3GB, Windows XP Pro, Parallels build 1910)
Acceleration level is shown in the Configuration section of the property page for your virtual machine (View menu > VM Property Page View). It can be High, Normal, or Disabled.
Acceleration is set to high and it seems to be working OK AutoCad & 3DS Max both boot and run as ecxpected. I'm running parallels on a MacBook Pro with 2GB ram.
3D Autocad working great I wrote a thread about my experience with 3D Autocad in Parallels and its working great. See the thread its called "3D AutoCad & Architectural Desktop 2006 Works Perfectly" Check it out.
