Using Auto cad "PC" on a bootcamped Mac

[Anonymous]

Hi Guys

I'm looking at up grading my laptop and can't decide between a PC and a MacBook Pro (it's a simple cost against usability argument). So the question is has anyone any experience at using Autocad on boot camp on a Mac. I know that I can use Autocad for Mac (and have been for the past 2 years), but miss some of the PC functions and am slightly concerned about how and for how long Autodesk are supporting the "for Mac" program.

I'm looking for any experiences in how well this works, how much swapping between OS and Windows is a pain, how big the windows partition needs to be to work well, etc.

I'm also going to post this in the Mac forum as well.

Thanks in advance.

Steve

[maxim_k · Accepted solution]

Welcome to Autodesk Forums!

Hi Steve,

I tried to run AutoCAD on MacBook Pro 15" 2013 with dedicated graphics card via bootcamp, and it runs just fine. The only one problem was lack of support for HiRes display (Retina) in the initial 2017 version, but now in 2018 version (PC) this problem has been resolved - it supports HiRes displays.

I don't like swapping between Bootcamp and Mac partition, so mainly I use AutoCAD for Windows inside parallels Desktop virtual machine, and this method also works reasonably well for me.

As about the size of Windows partition - I can say that Windows 10 itself with AutoCAD installed (without any additional applications and 6Gb RAM assigned to the Virtual machine) takes up about 26 Gb in my Virtual Windows 10 "hard drive", when updates come to Windows (I mean Creators update) it grows up to 30 - 32 Gb.

Maxim

[pendean]

If you are that concerned, why not commit to e WinPC and call it a day: or is there an over-arching business need to be in a mac environment outside of AutoCAD?

[john.vellek · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

I run AutoCAD 2016, 2017, 2018 and Revit 2018 in Windows on my Bootcamp partition.  I assigned 120 GB for the drive and regularly move project/dwg files to other storage and this leaves me about 25 GB of free space. The OS installed is Windows 10 with the Creators update.  I also have Microsoft Office and a few other smaller programs installed.

If I build this Mac again, I would consider Parallels or VMware Fusion so that I could run the macOS concurrently with Windows.

My MacBook is a 13-inch Retina (early 2013), 3GHz i7 with 8GB of RAM.

I do not see stellar performance due to the limitations of my hardware but I am not disappointed with the way these programs behave.

[john.vellek]

Hi @Anonymous,

I am checking back to see if my post or others helped you with your problem. Please mark a post or posts as accepted solutions if they resolved the issue or give me a bit more detail on this issue so we can continue to work towards getting this solved.

Please hit the Accept as Solution button if a post or posts solves your issue or answers your question.

[Anonymous]

Thanks guys.

All these comments help in steering me towards a solution, just need to sort out the other issues, but it's nice to know that Autocad won't be one of them.

Thanks again for your time.

Steve