Sketchup... OS X vs XP?

[James]

Gonna be purchasing Sketchup in the very near future. I'll be running it on a Macbook Pro & was considering buying the OS X version.

 

However, considering that I'll most likely be using AutoCAD at the same time (on XP via Bootcamp), it makes more sense to buy the XP version. Don't fancy a reboot every five minutes.

 

Has anyone been running Sketchup v6 through Bootcamp & encountered any problems?

 

James.

[jackb602]

What about running AutoCAD on Parallels so you don't need to reboot? I run AutoCAD under Virtual PC—which is supposedly much slower than Parallels—and it works very smoothly for 2d drafting.

 

Jack

[James]

Don't really know that much about it, to tell you the truth.

 

I'd heard through other forums that performance was better under Bootcamp... could be wrong. I was initially hoping that OS X Leopard would be released before purchasing the hardware, but that doesn't look likely. Heard there might be better support for OS virtualization.

 

If anyone else has experienced using ACAD/Sketchup on both Bootcamp & Parallels, I'd appreciate your thoughts.

[AJLynn]

I've used Sketchup 5 under Bootcamp and it runs perfectly - actually, I haven't yet found any software that would run on a similar spec PC laptop that doesn't run under Bootcamp. On the OSX side, SKP6 is finally a Universal Binary and I haven't really got into it yet but I bet it's compiled for the improved OpenGL system, so the Mac and Windows are as close to identical as they can get.

 

Jack's idea seems good too. The most important thing that Parallels doesn't give you is hardware 3D, so the one thing I wouldn't do is run Sketchup under Parallels. I don't know if I'd run Autocad under it either - it does have OpenGL, but I'm not sure how much advantage that gives you. At work I'm running it with nVidia Powerdraft, and I'm not sure how much advatage I get from that either, though I like to think it's faster.