Hello everyone





Windows Vista does indeed look to be a very fine OS. However, it is not yet suitable for CAD-CAM applications. For the time being, everyone in the CAD industry is waiting for Microsoft to address the situation - their response will be in accordance with how important the CAD industry is to them. They are of course CAD users themselves, so I hope that will jolt them into early action

If you need to invest in new hardware in the near future, it is wise to ensure that it is "Vista-ready", but for now, VX should be run on WindowsXP.

Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor

Not Ready

Time to move to Mac OSX Chris :-)

....sorry couldn't resist that :-)

Can't help wondering how long it will be until Microsoft stop supplying XP to OEMs or retail, or the chip builder make something that will need Vista installed....then where will we all be with our expensive openGL cards :-(

....in DirectX heaven according to Microsoft. Hey, Vista is Mac OSX, thats the root of the problem

Naah, OSX still uses OpenGL

This Vista release is causing a lot of headaches for people. Rather than go through all of the details, I will share just a few with you:
1) Vista prefers Direct3D to OpenGL so, generally, CAD/CAM applications are running much slower under Vista than under XP:

> ==========================================================
> u p F r o n t . e Z i n e
> 'The Business of CAD'
>
> Issue #504 | February 3, 2007 | English Edition
> ==========================================================
> www.upfrontezine.com | http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com
>
> Wow! Vista Runs CAD (up to) 50x Slower . . . . .
> Bill Gates thinks Vista is "Wow!", and Tom's Hardware thinks so, too.
> The popular benchmarking site ran the SPECviewperf 9.03 benchmarks on
> several CAD systems, and found that they slow to a crawl under Vista.
> Compared with XP, here are the results:
>
> Pro/Engineer = 6.7x slower.
> SolidWorks = 9.0x slower.
> TeamCenter = 9.1x slower.
> UGS NX = 50x slower.

However, this article does go on to note that the performance of some graphics cards for OpenGL is "quite good". We are attempting to build a list of those with acceptable performance under Vista. But, the only drivers we have so far heard of that work well are "Beta" drivers. Right now, it seems that many OpenGL application providers are waiting to see how the Graphics card industry will respond.

2) There are permission, compatibility and driver issues with Vista that will make it difficult for many users to switch from XP to Vista in the near future. I would recommend against this switch for any user right now.

Be patient, we are testing.