No more Bootcamp, Parallels or switching between a PC and Mac, well, yes, but no. The wait is finally over for all you Mac and Revit users thanks to Frame. In addition, we provide full support for a number of products when used on the Mac in virtualized environments including Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion.By Damien Jovica, Redstack. There are two ways to do this: Boot Camp and via a Virtual Machine (VM).Autodesk provides many native Mac products for 3D modeling, CAD, rendering, animation, VFX, and digital imagery.Once Windows is installed in the Boot Camp partition, you'll have the choice at startup to either boot into OS X or boot into Boot Camp (Windows). It's essentially "dual booting" your Mac. No more Bootcamp, Parallels or switching between a PC and Mac, well, yes, but no.Boot Camp is very straight forward.
![]() Read moreThere's obviously one major drawback: you won't be able to access OS X from Boot Camp. Revit is a much more complex system and its tied intrinsically to the Windows development platform. However, ACAD and Revit are very, very different pieces of software. That why I use other Mac based BIM programs export to ICS BIM Revit standards for consultants. You can install any Windows software you want, and it will run pretty much exactly like it would on a PC with the same hardware specs – same speed and everything.ACAD for Mac but not Revit when BIM is overtaking CAD Come on Autodesk. All the CPU, GPU and RAM is dedicated to Windows. Revit Download A 30You then can boot into Windows from within OS X, and have both operating systems running at the same time. Using the VM software, you install Windows on this "virtual" PC - no partitioning of your storage drive is needed - the VM is stored as a file that is accessed by the VM software. The software borrows RAM and CPU resources from OS X to power the VM. Download a 30-day free trial of Revit.Virtual machine software (also often referred to as "virtualizaton") "creates" a generic PC hosted in OS X. However, it will by far offer the best performance, so if you're going to spend a lot of time working in Revit, especially larger projects, or you need to let a rendering cook overnight, Boot Camp is probably your best bet.Use Revit software to produce consistent, co-ordinated and complete model-based building designs and documentation. While in Boot Camp, you're stuck in a Windows world. ![]() However, YMMV.There are three major VM options: Parallels Desktop for Mac, VMware Fusion, and Oracle VirtualBox.Parallels Desktop was first on the scene for Intel-based Macs, and is very popular. If you're planning on buying a Mac for this intended purpose, I'd strongly recommend seeking out a friend or associate with a similar Mac to try it out (also Apple also has a good return policy if you purchase directly from them).My personal experience: I have a Mac Pro (late 2013) at home: Xeon E5-1620 v2 3.7 GHz (3.9 GHz with Turbo Boost) 12GB RAM AMD FirePro D300, and I find Revit 2015 painfully sluggish compared to when in Boot Camp or my PC at work (i7-4770K 3.6 GHz (4 GHz with Turbo Boost) 16 GB RAM Nvidia GTX760Ti). If you already have a Mac, it's easy enough to try out yourself. Whether you'll be satisfied with performance depends mostly on your Mac's hardware specs and your expectations. VirtualBox is great software for being free software, but it's much more difficult to use and not nearly as fast, slick or feature complete as Parallels and Fusion. Both are offered as limited-time trial versions, and I'd recommend taking both for a spin and seeing which one works best for you.VirtualBox is free (though you still need a copy of Windows) and open-source software. It does have support for retina displays (see more about retina below).Both Parallels and Fusion cost about $80 US, plus you'll need to purchase a genuine copy of Windows to install (note that if you have an old copy of Windows laying around from a Dell, HP, etc., OEM versions of Windows often will refuse to install or activate on any PC other than the original one it came from). The latest version of Fusion 7 is still stuck on DX9, so the graphic features may be even more limited. Fusion is known for being very stable, but has been criticized for often being slightly slower than Parallels. The latest version of Parallels supports DX10 (DX11 is required for Revit's full graphic feature set, but none of the VM's support DX11 - frankly, I'm not sure how much of a difference it would make if they did), and retina displays (see more about retina below).VMware Fusion was released shortly after Parallels Desktop, but is from software vendor VMware, which is has a very long history with virtualization software on the PC side of things. This results in a couple of issues - icons and text can get very small or the application's user interface can get way out of whack. Windows, and Windows applications like Revit, were never really designed with this concept in mind. The way OS X works with a retina display is to effectively double the size of every element on the screen, but since the retina display resolution is twice a normal display in each direction, everything looks the same size as a normal display, only twice as sharp. Renaming it will prevent the hardware check, and appears to lead to better performance in many cases.Retina displays offer a super high resolution display that looks amazing in OS X. This file is used to check whether the hardware is "certified" for use with Revit, and if it isn't, it may prevents hardware performance enhancements that could otherwise be taken advantage of. Rename it something like AdskHardwareCertificationReport.OTTB. Excel linear regression for macI know a lot, but I don't know everything. Parallels or Fusion - has generally been a toss-up - I've used both extensively over the years, but now I stick with Parallels because of its faster performance.I've been a computer enthusiast for over twenty years. Keep in mind that many of the most recent Macs make future RAM upgrades very difficult or even impossible, so you may need to anticipate your future needs - in most cases, I'd recommend 16 GB from the start. You'll probably want to use one of the techniques suggested above for Boot Camp.Definitely check out these support articles:Parallels Mac support article on troubleshooting retina display issues with Windows.VMWare Fusion support article on troubleshooting retina display issues with Windows.If you're getting a Mac intending to use Revit extensively or full-time on it, spec the fastest CPU available, make it a quad core if available, and 8 GB of RAM minimum if you'll mostly be using Boot Camp, and 12 GB of RAM minimum if you'll be using a VM. This will likely break Revit unfortunately. Parallels and Fusion have settings in the VM's configuration, which effectively change the DPI resolution to 200%. May be slightly different, but the concepts are still the same. The details, model numbers, CPU/GPU names, etc. And *post* those questions, requests for advice, and solutions! (and generally speaking, please don't PM me with support questions - the forums are here for everyone to share their questions and answers - you might think your question is unique to you, but there are likely others who can also benefit from the discussion)Hi all - as of 2019, I'm no longer updating these hardware threads (unless there's a major change in technology or the way Revit utilizes hardware). I also use Parallels 6, so I'll have to update my Parallels 5 post to my latest settings and post that here as well (when I have time -) ). That being said, Fusion 4 is a great upgrade from Fusion 3 - definitely worth the upgrade in my opinion.
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