I'm a PC Switcher and have recently bought a 20" iMac with 2.16 Ghz Core 2 Duo chips and 2 GB of ram. While I bought it for home use I thought I would try out Parallels and run XP for those few apps I cant use on the Mac. I use Autocad and Architectural Desktop 2006 everyday and nearly all my work is in 3D modeling of steel structures and buildings. Some of these structures have thousands of parts even tens of thousands of parts so when you are 3D rotating a shaded model it takes a lot of horse power to redraw the screen in real time. My PC workstation has a 3.4Ghz P4 with 2GB of ram and a Workstation Grade 256mb Nvidia Graphics card and it struggles sometime on the larger models. So I thought no way will a virtual machine be able to handle that sort of load with an emulated graphics card and the CPU's taking all the load but what the hell I'll try it out for fun. I was encouraged after installing XP as its seemed to be running at native speeds so I loaded up Autocads Architectural Desktop 2006 to give it a spin. Well I was shocked when I fired up ADT and loaded up a big model and started to 3D orbit in full shaded mode and it handled it perfectly. So I set up the iMac beside my workstation and started comparing the two. The redraws were every bit as fast on the iMac, there were no artifacts it was running at native speeds without any loss in graphic sharpness. So I loaded up my 3rd Party steelwork software which hooks into ADT this gives me the ability to generate individual shop drawings for every single component in the structure within AutoCAD. This particular structure would generate around 300 drawing each in its own dwg file. Not only does the software need to draw each component on its own drawing but it also calculates a part list for each component and puts that on the drawing too so it takes some time. I had both machines sitting side by side and I pressed the button to generate the drawings at the same time well the iMac took 17 minutes to do it and the PC workstation 21 minutes. I was blown away. I have seen a few threads on this forum and the thought that 3D Autocad wouldn't work seems to be holding people back I say try it it works like a dream. Thats the last obstacle stopping me switching work and home to a Mac so goodbye Windows.
Partition? Irelandshope, how big is your Windows partition? and how much ram do you allocate to Parallels? Thank you for the information?
ADT in Parallels I went with the default partition size of 8GB then loaded up XP and ADT so I have around 3.5 GB free. I gave XP 1GB of ram and a 1.5GB page file. Best Regards
Land Desktop runs too I have been running Autocad Land Desktop 2004 under paralles for about a month now with no problems. I mostly do 2d work, so I only have to give it 512 mb's of memory, and it runs much faster than my old windows box. --C. Alan
