Has anyone run Wildfire on a Mac?

[ptc-2977519]

Out of curiosity, will Wildfire v3-4-5 run on one of the new iMacs with 8gigs of ram and the ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB video card? I want to try installing Windows7 and run within a vmFusion or BootCamp virtual machine, but am hesitant to make the investment if the video card compatibility will cause too many issues which cannot be overcome. Thanks- -D
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[ptc-2690189]

I installed windows on I-MAC just to run Wildfire IV via Bootcamp and have had no problems

[ptc-2977519]

Dennis- Thank you! This is good news. Is it one of the new iMacs? Can you tell me whether you are running Snow Leopard on the Mac, is it one of the newer ones, and which version of Windows? Is the 'Style' component enabled in WildFire which allows the ISDX free-form construction? Thanks- -D

[ptc-2060560]

"Dale Raymond" wrote:

Dennis- Thank you! This is good news. Is it one of the new iMacs? Can you tell me whether you are running Snow Leopard on the Mac, is it one of the newer ones, and which version of Windows? Is the 'Style' component enabled in WildFire which allows the ISDX free-form construction? Thanks- -D

[ptc-2060560]

D, I've loaded Proe student version on my iMac and it works great. My iMac is the first version that runs on the Intel processor and has Leopard loaded. If it will run on that I'm sure a newer version will work even better. I don't know about Windows 7 running with Bootcamp though. That's on you may want to look into. Sherman

[ptc-2993905]

Yep - this combination works well on my laptop, even when I am running a 2nd 22" LCD monitor. MacBook Pro + VMware Fusion or BootCamp booting Windows XP SP3 + SnowLeopard. The essential "3rd mouse button" is command + left button on the Mac.

[ptc-1901895]

One of the big questions that I have is about the graphics card(s). Wildfire makes extensive use of the graphics card. One of the biggest uses for rendering in Pro is the real time rendering and the speed to do so. Can anyone verify if you can do so on the new MAC. Typically Quadro FX series cards are the only cards I know of that can support this functionality. -Best Frank

[ptc-2977519]

Frank- I understand that Nvidia has launched back in April or May a new Quadro for the Mac Pro. It's priced on Amazon at around $1400. Indications from Nvidia's site indicate full compatibility! I'm still putting my system together and have not been able to test the interaction between Mac & ProE. Since the Mac has fairly robust graphics abilities, I was hoping not to need to spend the cost of a small laptop on a dedicated graphics card! Thanks- -Dale

[DavidBurnett]

I've been running Pro-E for over one year on my iMac. It's partitioned, but I didn't use bootcamp, I found my own drivers. I run XP 64 bit. It only has ATI Radeon 2600 HD with 256MB. It's a fine setup, nice and quiet for working at home. Don't expect perfection, as there are sometimes glitches when redrawing in drawing mode. Rendering could be better, but I don't use Pro-E for rendering. Avoid VM Fusion and Parallels, they won't let you use your graphics card Open GL for Pro-E. Do use 64 bit OS and Pro-E editions.

[rob.frei]

I have installed and run Pro/E WF3 and WF4 on both my 3 GHz 8 core Mac Pro and my dual processor MacBook Pro. On the Mac Pro, I have WF4 running on bootcamp on Vista 64 Ultimate. I only have the stock ATI Radeon X1900 video card in this machine. WF4 runs great when I boot to Vista. I work with very large assemblies too (we utilize high-end quad core Dell workstations in the office). I am also able to run WF4 on this machine via VMWare Fusion 3 and it works great (though I wouldn't use it to work on large assemblies, smaller jobs are fine). As for my MacBook Pro, I have WF4 running on the same configuration. The MBP does a great job when I boot to Vista (even with large assemblies). I do development work so I utilize virtual machines running different operating systems on a 500GB external firewire drive (which also works great). I have WF3 loaded to Windows XP Pro (x64). I also have Windows 7 (x64) loaded to a virtual machine and I'm in the process of loading WF5 to do some testing. I have had no problems running Pro/E on the Mac with various configurations (and with very large assemblies). In fact, I've been impressed by how well Pro/E runs on the Mac. My Mac Pro handles large assemblies better than our high end Windows machines (of course those aren't octo-cores). I also write code using the VB API that was introduced with WF4. I've been doing all of my development work on my MacBook Pro in Visual Studio 2008 talking to WF4 on Vista (x64) all in a virtual environment (bootcamp) on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard). Did I mention that you can run Pro/Mechanica and Ansys too? If you have a mighty mouse, you'll find that it works great for Pro/E (AutoDesk Maya too).