X7 Is Slow As Hell On New Imac 5K ?!?


simonas
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Hi all,

recently bought new work machine iMac 5K specially for working with Chief X7. Installed Chief and my hands dropped! X7 is slow as hell on this new machine. Have tried to install X6 and it works much better. Installed windows version X7 through parallels desktop on iMac and it works even better.

have contacted Chiefs support team and they said I might have to wait till X8 maybe it will be fixed.

Just wondering if anyone else experience slowness on this new iMac 5K? Especially zooming and panning in 2d view.

 

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Hi Perry,

no effect here. Support team suggested to turn off display for all framing layers and it worked for elevation view, but not 2d view. The only thing that helps is to reduce Chiefs window like half size of the screen or reduce displays resolution in imacs preferences. Now that's a pity - you buy big display and still working on small window... 

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Try to set the "Recent files" to "0" or a low number. Chief Recently found this problem and it worked for me. Not using a Mac but might help

Yep, worked for me too.  Toyed around a bit and I noticed after 5 files the slowdown begins, that is a far cry from the 60 file setting I had been keeping for all the prior editions of Chief.  

 

Sure hope this gets fixed.  I like keeping projects separated, folders nested into folders, nested into folders ... and only having to look for a file once when revising or quick access when answering questions over the phone.

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Slow Yosemite is the problem. All my Macs were fine until I went to Yosemite. If you could down grade to Mavericks, you could run X7 like lightning on your machine. But I don't think downgrading is an option on the 5K.

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I'm not sure of all the reasons why the 5K iMac is so slow. It sound's like they may have some OS level performance problems in addition to the the fact that the hardware is being asked to drive a massive number of pixels on low power mobile hardware.

 

The number of recent files has near zero effect on a Mac. It is a Windows only issue.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have to buy a new computer for my weekend place.  I have been dragging my laptop back and forth but now the hard drive is acting up so it may be on its way out.  Since I store all my work files in the cloud I was considering buying an iMac and leaving it at the farm.  The available computing power on the 5k machine is better than a maxed out standard iMac which is the appeal to me rather than the screen resolution. 

 

All that being said, did the slowness issue you described ever get resolved?  I have been using a 27" hd cinema display and been very happy with it.  I can't imagine needing anything clearer than that for the work that I do.   But if the performance of Chief is being impacted then maybe I should get the machine with less power and the standard 27" display.

 

Thoughts?

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I've been chatting with support team about this issue for a while. This is the latest answer I've got:

"...I forwarded this information on to our developers and testing deparments. If they decide to prioritize fixing this before X8, then they will release another update to X7."

 

I would be more than happy to have updates every week or so, now I have to wait full one year for them to fix it... if they fix it.

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After working on 5k I would not go back to any lower resolution and yes I will even struggle with Chiefs slowness hoping it will be fixed quickly. If you buy regular iMac (and in one year all pc's will have 4-5k screens) you will regret having "commodore 64" on your deck :) i think

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After working on 5k I would not go back to any lower resolution and yes I will even struggle with Chiefs slowness hoping it will be fixed quickly. If you buy regular iMac (and in one year all pc's will have 4-5k screens) you will regret having "commodore 64" on your deck :) i think

Thanks.  I will go for it then.  Much appreciated.

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Happy with 'Microsoft Home' on the 'cloud'  All MS Office Software, up to five users, up to +5 TB cloud storage, up to 300 Skype minutes, on up to 5 machines (Mac or Windows, computers, tablets, phone)  at $99.99 a year... Su

 

Sounds like a nice set up.  We are an all Apple household though with 5 computers and 9 iPads and all of them talking together so we are pretty much locked in at this point.  But sometimes I do yearn for the days with three tv channels and a single rotary telephone in the hall.

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After working on 5k I would not go back to any lower resolution and yes I will even struggle with Chiefs slowness hoping it will be fixed quickly. If you buy regular iMac (and in one year all pc's will have 4-5k screens) you will regret having "commodore 64" on your deck :) i think

 

 

Simonas I also use the 5K. I've found that turning off the cursor crosshairs made a difference. Still not perfect but at least I don't have to downscale the resolution anymore.

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It's always easy for software developers to point to new hardware or OS and say "Maybe that's to blame......". The problem is it's often not the hardware or the OS but something a developer altered without noticing when they fixed something else, or added new functionality.

 

The problem with CA is that every major release that comes out seems to have stability problems and it seems to take 3 or 4 patch releases until the new version is as stable as was the previous version.

 

My current issue with X7 is when I do an undo with a complex model; CA goes into a 30 minute silence during which it displays a  "Building 3D Model, Generating Surfaces" progress box which hangs at about 20%, memory usage soars to 6.3Gb, it then displays a "Not enough memory to complete operation...Close all windows, save all work, exit application........" error, which if I click "OK" it magically completes the operation.

 

This happens on both machines I tried X7 on. It does not happen in X6. Maybe it's because both machines use Intel 4400 graphics chips, I don't know and I don't care because it doesn't happen on the same machines in X6.

 

CA shouldn't be using its users to do its QA. When CA puts out a new release it should be at least as stable as the previous release. CA should also add the option to export files compatible with previous versions. At least then I wouldn't be faced with needing to rebuild an entire model in X6 because X7 is not yet production quality. 

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There are likely some things we can do to improve the performance on the 5K iMac. That will take some research to track down. I'm not sure if there is much we can do but it is something we should look into.

 

The 30 minute delay on undo is something that should not be happening. If you can get a plan to our support team that duplicates the problem that would be ideal. It it hard to say what the cause is for that slowness is. It is unlikely that it is the graphics card though. The fact that it is slower in X7 is not good, we would like to have a plan to look at to diagnose the problem.

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  • 4 months later...

Actually, I had a similar issue with Mac and Vectorworks back some time ago - almost like working under water.  There was some easy fix to this though I thought having to do with system memory.  All I remember is it was night and day once I turned something off.

 

CA shouldn't be slow at all, its surprisingly a very small application.

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Just another question - in your new computer did you put an SSD drive, or did you get it with the standard HD?  I've found nothing in a computer speeds things more than an SSD drive, and conversely not having it is a major performance buster.  I bought a new family computer recently and forgot how much difference an SSD is - and even though it had a great processor/ram/video card the whole system is a slug without an SSD.

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