topic Best Mac Hardware for Fusion in Fusion Support Forum

Best Mac Hardware for Fusion

jaylaudeman — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 01:02:09 GMT

I am looking to upgrade to a new Mac and want to know which option would be the best for Fusion. Currently I am using a 2015 iMac 27" its has gotten really slow working on Fusion with it so I really need to upgrade. I am wondering which would be the best Mac option for Fusion, I have been looking between the Mac Studio or weather it would be best to go with the Mac Mini with an Intel i7 and upgraded ram. By the time you start upgrading the components of the Mac Mini it adds up and I'm not sure if it would be worth it. I wasn't sure how the M2 Max would be compared to the i7, I know it might be better for Fusion but overall would with be worth it.

Re: Best Mac Hardware for Fusion

sutherland- — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 07:12:19 GMT

Hi @jaylaudeman

You could look into the System Requirements of the software and then try to go with something a little bit superior than that, since it is always better to have some margin for future updates.

At the same time you could also see how to improve F360 performance, which can dramatically increase the dynamics of your work.

Hope any of this helps.

Happy New Year!

Re: Best Mac Hardware for Fusion

TrippyLighting — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 13:23:31 GMT

Can you elaborate what exactly s slow?

Is it modeling operations and recomputing of the timeline or generating toolpaths, or rendering, or loading/saving models, or sketching ?

All those questions relate to different software parts of Fusion 360 that might require different approaches. Some are hardware related, some are not.

Re: Best Mac Hardware for Fusion

jaylaudeman — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 16:55:55 GMT

It's taking just over 2 min to just open up fusion with nothing else running. Overall it is just slower with all operations, I have a higher end PC at work that I use fusion on most days and my Mac is just sluggish. I have a laptop at home that has a i5 2.4GHz and it preforms better than the Mac has been. My designs do deal with a lot of patterns so I know there is a lot of compute time on that end but like I said my overall basic commands are just slower than the other computers I've been using.

Re: Best Mac Hardware for Fusion

TrippyLighting — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 17:13:19 GMT

In general the best single core performance will help you most. As such opting for those higher end macs that have more cores will not be very beneficial for Fusion 360 and CAD software in general. Patterns (hopefully not in a sketch) just as most modeling operations utilize the geometric modeling kernel. Much of the math and algorithms in these kernels does not lend itself to parallel processing

Also , development on these kernels started 40 years ago, so well before multicore processors existed.

That is of course until you start rendering things in Fusion 360. Rendering algorithms are highly parallelizable and use every bit of every CPU core you have in a machine. Rendering in Fusion 360 is CPU based and does NOT use the GPU. The GPU is only used for Viewport display.

RAM is another consideration. I would opt for 32GB.

Re: Best Mac Hardware for Fusion

kevinthefro — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 19:19:29 GMT

What category does In Process Stock (IPS) calculations fall under? Single-threaded or multi-threaded? Each time I modify a toolpath I want to simulate it to make sure it's doing what I want, but the simulation will sit frozen until the IPS calcs for all following operations have completed - even though I'm not simulating them.
Once the IPS cals are done the simulation runs fine.
I just updated to 2.0.20476 and it's several times slower than before - which is about 4 minutes of waiting on my current design.

Thanks,
Kevin