Pro Engineer Wildfire 4.0 problems

Welcome to the Apple Discussions,

With 3D rending applications like ProE it is wise to max out the memory on your machine to 8 GB and also run them in Bootcamp rather than an emulation program like Fusion. Those are the two things I would recommend doing to improve performance. If you don't want to run in Bootcamp at a minimum upgrade the RAM.

Regards,

Roger

Please when replying do not reply to yourself, reply to the post you want to otherwise it gets pretty confusing.

Yes I think memory is a good part of issue and as I said earlier upgrading the RAM would probably give you the best boost in performance. PTC doesn't list Windows 7 as a recommended OS so you should check with them for their latest specifications. However what I found was this:

http://www.ptc.com/WCMS/files/52592/en/proewf4.pdf

PTC says 1 GB of RAM or more, your computer has 4 GB but not all of it is being used for Pro E. You are using RAM for OS X, Win 7 and finally Pro E. That means it is probably competing for RAM, so if you upgraded your RAM that means more could be dedicated to Pro E which would equate to improved performance.

There are two places I would recommend looking for RAM upgrades first is:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/AppleMacBook_MacBookPro/Upgrade/DDR3

next would Crucial located at:

http://www.crucial.com/mac/index.aspx

Roger

I understand, have you tried running it in Bootcamp rather than Fusion? I think that would give you the best performance.

TheCarGuy wrote:
Could there possibly be an issue with using Windows 7 as opposed to XP/Vista?

That I cannot answer, you would need to touch bases with PTC and ask.

I understand the convenience factor however when you run graphics intensive applications that are designed for another platform running them in their native state will give you the best performance. In other words there is going to be a trade off between convenience and performance.

TheCarGuy wrote:
is there an easy way to convert all of my files from VMware to a Bootcamp partition seamlessly?

Sorry I don't know that one either, you might want to ask in a Bootcamp forum like:

http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1244

or

http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1245

Just curious as to what version of VMware Fusion you are running? The 3.0 version which is the latest helped with graphics and stuff. I hate to see you throw more money at the issue, but that could be something to look at as well. If your a student go to the Apple Edu Store and get the EDU version, I think its the full version for $40 or so.

If you are running VMware Fusion 3.0 then I agree with other post of using BootCamp. That way your booted fully into Windows 7 and using the full hardware capabilities instead of having that emulation layer. Windows 7 is now supported with bootcamp as well with the latest updates.

As for moving files over from VMware to Bootcamp I would imagine you would have to reinstall everything, but you may be able to drag over directories or other files and stick them in the same place as you have them in VMware. Its alot easier going from Bootcamp to VMware or Parallels and trying to do it the way you are. Hope I helped somewhat.

-Dan

I too have just done the same thing with my mac book pro, and I am running vmware fusion 3.0. So it has not fixed the issue even with its improved 3d graphics performance. The issue that I have is with the "prehighlight" function in Pro E. With the ram maxed out in Windows 7 at 3.6 gb with priority given to ProE as well as using two cores and the 9600M GT graphics card, the program continues to bog down only when rolling over edges or datum planes. I have heard that by removing the prehighlight feature it will greatly improve the speed, but I have not found this option yet in wildfire 4.0 student edition.

Ok, so after my original post earlier today, I did a little research and found a solution to both of our problems. Believe it or not, it is boot camp. While fusion integrates windows into the mac OS very nicely, it takes away from the graphical computing power that your mac truly has. By running windows independently, it is free to use all of your graphics power as well as your ram. With this being said, I am now running proE wildfire 4.0 student edition using boot camp on a macbook pro with 4.0 gb of ram and using the geforce 9600M GT graphics card. ProE runs faster than I could have ever imagined. Unfortunately I now have a brand new version of vmware fusion that will be collecting dust in my hard drive. I hope this helps. (and works for you as well if you decide to try it)

p.s. Just be careful about windows activation because if you have an OEM copy of windows already activated in a virtual machine you will be out of luck when you try to activate it in boot camp