After Two Years, Autodesk Maya and AutoCAD Become Apple Silicon-Native (arstechnica.com) 19
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It has been two years and four months since the first Apple Silicon Mac hit the market, and now Autodesk has finally updated some of its massively popular professional applications (AutoCAD and Maya) to run natively on M1 and M2 chips. The availability of AutoCAD for Mac 2024 was announced in a blog post on Autodesk's website on March 28. Like other major AutoCAD updates, it adds new features like expanded automation tools and easier workflows, but the announcement that "for the first time, AutoCAD for Mac 2024 and AutoCAD LT for Mac 2024 now run natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon architectures, including M1 and M2 chips in the M-series chips" is clearly the headlining feature.
Autodesk claims that Apple Silicon support "can increase overall performance by up to two times" compared to the 2023 version of AutoCAD. A day later, on March 29, Autodesk revealed the 2024 update for Maya, its 3D modeling software chiefly used in game development, film production, and visual effects. Maya 2024 brings native Apple Silicon support in addition to a slew of new features, including the LookDevX material editor, Hydra support, and so on. But in contrast to many other makers of widespread professional software in similar industries, such as Adobe and Unity, Autodesk's efforts to support Apple Silicon -- which were announced two years ago -- have been ongoing for an interminably long time. Even open source Maya competitor Blender beat Autodesk to the punch.
Autodesk claims that Apple Silicon support "can increase overall performance by up to two times" compared to the 2023 version of AutoCAD. A day later, on March 29, Autodesk revealed the 2024 update for Maya, its 3D modeling software chiefly used in game development, film production, and visual effects. Maya 2024 brings native Apple Silicon support in addition to a slew of new features, including the LookDevX material editor, Hydra support, and so on. But in contrast to many other makers of widespread professional software in similar industries, such as Adobe and Unity, Autodesk's efforts to support Apple Silicon -- which were announced two years ago -- have been ongoing for an interminably long time. Even open source Maya competitor Blender beat Autodesk to the punch.
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So how'd you find this place, anyway? Someone mention it in the Youtube comments section?
speed increase up to 2x (Score:1)
I guess Rosetta 2's stellar "not an emulator" technology that runs x86 code at near native speeds or better will now give way to 2x speed ups due to native ARM execution.
The lies never get old.
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I guess Rosetta 2's stellar "not an emulator" technology that runs x86 code at near native speeds or better will now give way to 2x speed ups due to native ARM execution.
The lies never get old.
Translation, please?
Are you saying that Rosetta is not slow, or that Apple's implementation of ARM is not fast? My experience isn't endless, but M1 Pro has been pretty speedy... even when running Windows on Parallels.
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Same. Surprisingly good battery life, too. That said, I am looking forward to Unreal getting all its M1-related upgrades completed.
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Likewise. My M1 Pro 16" is the best computer I've ever used. It has it's quirks, but for something basically representing the best of the first generation of M1-based desktop computing... it's pretty stellar. As long as you're not trying to game on it.
Also, fuck Parallels hard. Used it for awhile but I'd rather be able to buy it outright. Tired of subscription-based bullshit. VMWare Fusion works well enough, not nearly as fast, but it's not nearly as annoying.
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It runs x86 about the same speed than my 4yo i7 laptop.
Its plenty fast.
Blender (Score:2)
It should be noted that if Blender beat the other two to the punch, it was because Apple made the necessary Metal contributions to the project.
Those contributions were probably a useful reference point for anyone wanting to add Metal support to their app?
Without Revit it doesn't really matter (Score:4, Insightful)
AutoCAD isn't what it used to be; there are competitiors that run on pretty much all platforms. Revit/BIM is a different story.
AutoDesk -- not impressed .... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm glad to hear they finally made native M1/M2 versions of these products. (I mean, there was a time when they wouldn't even do a native release of AutoCAD for Mac at all.)
But I really question AutoDesk's competency in general.
It seems like they rake in big money off of what's essentially very old/mature code with relatively minor additions and changes made each year?
I recently had to deploy the free DWG TrueView 2023 software so some of our folks in legal and real-estate could view some CAD drawings of properties they were getting in email. Packaging it to install through InTune and the "Company Portal" app in Windows was awful. They seem to have several different "bundles" of the same application, packaged up different ways. So even someone who goes to the effort to detail all the steps to get it configured for an automated push-install may be giving you info that doesn't work for the one you downloaded.
The worst part, though? Once you extract all of the compressed files from the installer into a folder (so you can get something usable, with a Setup.exe file at the root of it and a folder structure you can point to and properly package up into a .intunewin file), you wind up with a package that installs for people but won't run afterwards!
You have to do a registry edit after the install to correct this, as noted here:
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5... [autodesk.com]
And while it's been years since I last worked with their products before now? I remember working for a steel fabricator that used their products, a long while back, and having all sorts of similar headaches with their installers. I know we used to have to maintain a license server to issue out license keys on demand for AutoCAD back then, and that thing was always causing problems. I had a friend who worked at Boeing back then, and he told me it was such a problem for them, they got AutoDesk to give them a copy of the software that didn't look for a key. (I guess when you're that big and spend that much, you get special favors.)
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I still remember when they bought Discreet/Media 100/Radius and killed EditDV/CineStream. Of all the companies I would like to see go under, they are #2 on my list, behind only Adobe, and for pretty much precisely the same reason.
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I still remember when they bought Discreet/Media 100/Radius and killed EditDV/CineStream. Of all the companies I would like to see go under, they are #2 on my list, behind only Adobe, and for pretty much precisely the same reason.
R.I.P. Serious Magic! Ovation was an incredible product they killed, and while DVRack was arguably a product whose workflow got passed by, it was funny how their version was like 20MB installed, and then OnLocation CS3 ballooned to like 400MB and got its own dedicated installer CD in the Production Premium CS3 bundle.
And, of course, Macromedia Director was a product of its era (always fun to revisit "Enhanced CDs" made with it), but it was an interesting blend of IDE and multimedia production that was a uni
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R.I.P. Serious Magic! Ovation was an incredible product they killed, and while DVRack was arguably a product whose workflow got passed by, it was funny how their version was like 20MB installed, and then OnLocation CS3 ballooned to like 400MB and got its own dedicated installer CD in the Production Premium CS3 bundle.
And, of course, Macromedia Director was a product of its era (always fun to revisit "Enhanced CDs" made with it), but it was an interesting blend of IDE and multimedia production that was a unique onramp for both. I do wish that it got more love than it did. ...so yeah, I agree, neither Autodesk nor Adobe have the greatest track record with its acquisitions.
FrameMaker for Mac, too.
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I'm glad to hear they finally made native M1/M2 versions of these products. (I mean, there was a time when they wouldn't even do a native release of AutoCAD for Mac at all.)
But I really question AutoDesk's competency in general.
It seems like they rake in big money off of what's essentially very old/mature code with relatively minor additions and changes made each year?
They've been all-in on subscription licensing for a while now. I've got a client hanging on to AutoCAD LT2015 because it was the last perpetually-licensed release; now they want $3,000 per seat per year...it's a small enough firm that that's a larger line item than it needs to be. Oh, and don't forget the fact that they went all the way to SCOTUS to defend their stance that the law of first sale doesn't apply to software licenses if their DRM can adequately enforce it.
AutoCAD is one of those software titles