VmWare Fusion and Autocad

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Hi there,

I am an architecture student working my way through college and am investing in an new imac come september. I just had a few questions before I make my final decision on the setup of my computer.
I was told that VmWare Fusion was probably not the best way to go if I want to run AutoCAD 2008, and to use Bootcamp because it is more stable. Is this true? Also the person that I talked to suggested that I upgrade the RAM in it to 4gz, which I can see being very useful, but is it necessary? One of the reasons that I want to run Fusion is because I hate the idea of having to reboot my computer just to use AutoCAD; and I also enjoy listening to music when I am drafting, and do not want to dublicate all of my music files onto the partitioned Windows side. Thus taking up more room on the hard drive.

Any help on this subject would be appreciated greatly, much thanks,

cheers

ryan
 

cwa107


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cwa107


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I probably wouldn't bother with virtualization in light of your AutoCAD needs. AutoCAD is a pretty heavy-hitter and although the newest versions of VMWare and Parallels have some limited 3D support, it's pretty weak and doesn't offer the full performance potential of your video card. AutoCAD is one of those apps that will benefit greatly from being run natively (i.e. via Boot Camp).
 
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Thanks for the reply. I do mainly 2D in AutoCAD, not to much rendering and all, mostly floor plans, would that affect the performance of the video card at all? I am just trying to get the best solution because I have heard many different things. Some people have told me that if I were to bump up the ram to 4gz and devote 2gz to the windows side that it should be fine. What are your thoughts?

thanks in advance

Ryan
 
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If you are mainly doing 2D work, you should be able to do it within Fusion. I do a fair amount of Visio diagrams on my MBP, with 4 GB RAM, and have had no issues so far. Fusion 2.0 has some additional support for DirectX on XP and VMWare, and I've seen some pretty neat improvements so far in the video performance using it. Go to Crucial or some other place to get your RAM for the MAC, in order to keep your costs down, and try it.

Also, use XP, not Vista, if you are expecting to have any kind of video performance anyway ;-)

Good luck,
P
 
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i appreciate the reply, =)

so if i were to use fusion, which i really want to do because of the not rebooting factor, and apply vista to that because i already own a copy of it, that would affect my performance, but by how much do u think? would i notice a huge decrease? i would just be running autocad in fusion anyways, i would not use windows at all if i had a choice. i think that i might also just buy it from apple directly just because i can get an educational discount on it. and i can upgrade it right there =) also, i have been looking, but with no luck, do u know of any canadian company's that supply fusion? i live in london ontario and am having a really hard time finding places

so much thanks duder,

cheers
ryan
 
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Fusion has a 30-day free trial download (as does Parallels). Best answer we can give (because we don't know exactly what you are doing), is try it and see. Play with it, and the settings, and see if it works before you decide between native mode and a virtual machine.
 

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