ASCON’s new Renga Architecture may look promising but it disregards Apple’s Mac

Discovering that ASCON’s new Renga Architecture, which Ralph Grabowski, of UpFront.eZine, wrote about in his CAD newsletter today, was initiated in 2011 with two programmers may help explain why the company’s new 2D/3D architectural CAD solution ignores Apple’s Mac platform seemingly entirely. Of course, that doesn’t exactly hold any kind of water from this author’s view. Forget about this publication’s passion for Apple, even Autodesk had already come back to the Mac with AutoCAD by that time, and explained why.

MORE: Exclusive: AutoCAD’s Fateful Return to the Mac

While some, including Grabowski, may have felt mighty Autodesk was wasting its time and resources by focusing on the Mac, the largest company in the world is fast approaching a 100 million users installed Mac base. So, perhaps there are technical decisions behind this decision. For instance, when looking at Renga Architecture’s technical requirements one finds that it requires either Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 and in particular a graphics board with support for DirectX 10c with Shader Model 4.0 support. This Russian infant is built around Microsoft DirectX—not the industry standard OpenGL graphics API.

MORE: Khronos speaks to Architosh about the new Vulkan Graphics API: What it Means

For a brand new AEC tool to come to market and be programmed around technologies that will never be supported on the Mac platform is somewhat surprising. But things can obviously change. The whole CAD industry will be, over the next few years, gently pushed towards new industry standards like the new Vulkan API, for example.

Renga Architecture: Brand New AEC 3D CAD (But Just for Windows!)

Russia’s new Renga Architecture is now available and costs €1,599 but comes with a 60-day trial. Readers can download and learn more here.

01 – A view of the new Renga Architecture 3D AEC CAD software from Russia’s ASCON. The software is now available, but only for Windows.  (image: ASCON. All rights reserved.)

There is a new Renga Architecture website and ASCON focuses on why Renga is ideal for architects, managers, IT specialists, and educators. As Grabowski notes in his excellent summary interview, Renga features an intelligent 3D snapping technology that automatically finds the planes and vertices you want to snap to, within its all 3D working interface. ASCON notes to Grabowski that it tools six months of dedicated programming just to work out that capability and notes that most CAD systems don’t work that way.

Renga Architecture supports export (only it seems) to IFC (for BIM workflows), DXF for CAD interoperability and OBJ (for rendering and animation interoperability). Data is exchanged via .csv files.

Grabowski’s interview with ASCON about Renga can be found here.