Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

10 Dec 2001

VectorWorks 9.5 gets much faster, notes on kernel and more...

Architosh was pleased to report the news of Nemetschek's release of VectorWorks 9.5 for Mac OS X last week. Equally pleasing was news of faster performance, especially since version 9 reportedly (according to numerous readers) suffered some speed setbacks.

Rendering Kernel Speeds Up

According to notes on Nemetschek NA's website, 'Hidden Line' rendering is now twice as fast in version 9.5, compared to version 9. We took the time to ask Nemetschek North America's chief technology officer, Sean Flaherty, where the 'speed-up' was coming from...because twice as fast is a great improvement.

"Since we've changed to floating point with this version, we've learned that the Macintosh responds particularly well to 'targeted floating-point tuning', says Sean Flaherty. "Using the same techniques, we've also nearly doubled the speed of our solids modeling engine on the Mac compared to 9.0.1."

And a 300 Percent Speed Up of Switching Sheets

Sean tells us there was a series of minor improvements spread throughout the new PowerPlant-based "shell". "While Carbonizing [the process of turning a classic Mac app into a OS X app] the application and upgrading our development environment with new tools, we had the chance to improve how the UI shell communicates with the CAD core of VectorWorks", says Sean.

Much of the other speed ups were accomplished because of this type of tuning, a process wherein the shell of the program (the part that is written differently for each supported OS [operating system]) and its communication calls to the core of the program (the part of the code common to both Mac and Windows) were sped up...most likely due to some seriously focused code re-writing.

These speed improvements are common to both Macintosh and Windows versions of VectorWorks 9.5, while there will be slight differences between the two.

See VectorWorks 9.5 up close

As always Nemetschek North America will be at Macworld Expo San Francisco this coming January, showing their entire product line for Apple's new Mac OS X.