Aspire on new Mac M1 Processors

[Phil A]

In case anyone was wondering how well this works - I am running a Mac Studio (also tried this on a Mac mini) with Parallels. The Mac Studio is overkill for this (64 gRam M1Max processor). The version of Parallels I have is Desktop 18 Pro. I was running the Parallels Standard version with 4 CPUs and 8 gigs of ram (max amount) and it works very well. I did not have any issues/errors. The only negative part I observed was that doing complex models was significantly slower the more complex the models are. Fairly simple models were OK. I decided to upgrade to Parallels Pro and see if upping the CPUs (to 6) and memory (to 16g) would improve this. There was a marginal improvement but still noticeably slower than my stand-alone Windows i5 CPU box (nothing special) with Aspire on it. The Mac mini had very similar results. I can only hope that this will improve over time but it is a very workable solution. It would be nice if Vectric would create a Mac version but I certainly understand the economics of why there is not one. If anyone else has any recommendations on how to improve the performance via Parallels (or another virtual desktop app) please chime in.

[Jim_in_PA]

Thanks for that update...much appreciated. I'll not need to worry about this soon as the 2019 MPB I use has many more years of life, but it's good to know that there is a workable solution via Parallels (which I use now in the Intel world) for Apple silicon machines.

[martin54]

What version of the Vectric software are you running? I don't use a mac personally so have no personal experience. The latest versions of the vectric software use the GPU where previous versions did not. Don't know how that works when using a mac with parallels but something that might be worth checking is how the rendering is set up within the vectric software & try software render from the options menu to see if that makes any difference, it may be that you don't have a choice but worth a look

[adze_cnc]

There is mention that 11.5 uses a dedicated graphics if it is available for 3D rendering but I could find no mention of it using multiples CPU cores for general operation. If that is so then throwing more CPUs at the problem is only going improve the Windows emulation (to a point) if at all.

[Phil A]

martin54 - I am running the latest Aspire version (11.5xx). I did try tweaking some of the settings to see if it would improve performance but I could not see much if any improvement. I just wanted everyone who might be wondering if it works at all to know that it does and reasonably well - just a bit slower on complex models.

[RickW3DS]

I can confirm all CPU cores (Intel core I9) are utilized on my windows CAD box. GPU fans are also turning on now, they didn't before this release.