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3DS MAX and Rhino on a G5 with Virtual PC


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Anyone have any experience using 3DS MAX 5.1+ on OS 10.3 using Virtual PC?

 

I use Protools Digi 002, the Adobe Video and Creative Suites and Macromedia Studio (all of which perform from what I read better on the G5). Problem is more then half of my work is on Rhino and 3DS Max, which is keeping me from lunging with both feet from my Dell to a G5.

 

On rhino's web site they claim that it runs fine under virtual pc and I heard the Max performs poorly. But does anyone out there actually have any first person experience using rhino or 3DS MAX on virtual PC?

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My suggestion would be to buy the G5 for what you need it for and build a low cost PC for the 3D work. Use a KVM to share a monitor(s) between the machines.

 

I personally have a PowerBook for my video work and PCs for 3D.

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Brian,

 

I use Virtual PC on my dual G4 1GHz exclusively for Autocad. It works, but it's incredibly slow, and not very stable. I would recommend it for drafting, but not modeling, let alone rendering. I ran Cinebench on VPC to compare it to OS X, and it was something like 10 times as slow. So a 20% speed increase still won't help. I would either get a cheap Windows box, or consider one of the great 3d programs that run natively in OS X. Cheers,

 

Jack

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I tryed VPC with MAX in my 17" Powerbook when I had it last august and it was SLOWWWWWWW.

 

I have a G5 which I love, OSX rules ! but I am looking to get a PC (again) just for 3D work.

 

BTW, what KVM works with a ADC (apple display) or DVI?

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"If you build a PC onli for Max you will spend some in the 2000 neighborhood to get a DECENT machine, while a maya seat costing about 1500 seems to be a bargain considering that you can have all the Mac Power"

 

Its a shame the MAX does port to the mac. MAX and LW are very compatible with architectural date, and I just love the after market render engines for max.

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What do you mean?

you need a powerful windows machine with a high end graphics card to run 3dmax. anything less than a quadro graphics card and at the very least a 2ghz processor you are going to be waiting on it to catch up to you while moving around the interface. you will click something, and it will take a secound to react. i don't think that there is any chance to be productive with it running through virtual pc. i am not saying mac sucks, but running a program through vu=irtual pc, and running a program on windows are to entirely different things.

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you need a powerful windows machine with a high end graphics card to run 3dmax. anything less than a quadro graphics card and at the very least a 2ghz processor you are going to be waiting on it to catch up to you while moving around the interface. you will click something, and it will take a secound to react. i don't think that there is any chance to be productive with it running through virtual pc. i am not saying mac sucks, but running a program through vu=irtual pc, and running a program on windows are to entirely different things.

 

yep i agree!

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  • 9 months later...
My suggestion would be to buy the G5 for what you need it for and build a low cost PC for the 3D work. Use a KVM to share a monitor(s) between the machines.

 

I personally have a PowerBook for my video work and PCs for 3D.

 

I would like to second this suggestion. I have a lot of Post houses that use both Mac's and PC's and they never had any luck running PC software under Mac emulations.

:o In fact if you are within driving distance of Green Bay, Wisconsin you can pick up one of our old Classroom Max Machines for $150.

Not the newest set up but the price is right. I have several Intergraph Dual PIII 600MHz machines with between 784MB and 1GB RAM, most have 2 or 3 each 40Gig Hard Drives and all have Geforce3 TI 200 nVidia boards with either 64MB or 128MB on board. I forget. Keyboard, Mouse come with it too.

They either have Windows2000 or XP Pro loaded depending on which machine you want.

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