Architect Benefits
Realize your most inspired visions with Vectorworks Architect. After all, you inspired its design. It's flexible, so you have the freedom to design the way you want. It's versatile, so you can create, model, and present easily and precisely with one application. It's intuitive, so it works the way you think. It's a smart investment that's affordable, customer-focused, and proven worldwide.
Flexible: Enjoy the Freedom to Design the Way You Want
With the Vectorworks Architect program, you're not limited to a prescribed workflow, so you have the freedom to design in your own way. Incorporate your existing approach to design to make the best use of the skills you already have in-house. Collaborate seamlessly with co-workers and colleagues who use other software applications.
Versatile: Create, Model, and Present with One Application
Move easily between tasks. From design concepts to construction documentation and every phase in between, the Vectorworks Architect product marries precision drafting and flexible modeling with state-of-the-art technology. Create, model, and present easily and precisely with one application. With Vectorworks Architect software, you can do it all.
Intuitive: Work the Way You Think
Easy-to-use Interface and Drafting Tools
Do what you like to do best—design. You won't waste time getting up to speed because the Vectorworks Architect software's simple, customizable interface and what-you-see-is-what-you-get display make it easier to learn and use than standard CAD applications. No matter what you're switching from, the Vectorworks Architect application interface will be familiar. Vectorworks' SmartCursor technology replaces manual drafting tools, so even inexperienced CAD users can make the switch easily.
Smart: Invest in yourself
Affordable, customer-focused, and proven as the tool of choice for 450,000 designers worldwide—the Vectorworks Architect software is a smart investment in you.
Create dynamic 2D and 3D designs, glide through your projects with a tightly streamlined interface, and access extensive features and resource libraries. Vectorworks Architect offers the features you want in a comprehensive, intuitive software that will multi-task just like you do.
- A vast suite of 2D precision drafting tools provide you intelligent ways to design
- Building Information Modeling functionality is available in flexible 2D/3D workflows
- Intelligent building shell tools enable an easy transition into a BIM workflow
- Hybrid 2D/3D architectural objects allow you to design with valuable information already attached
- A suite of powerful free-form modeling tools make it easy to design custom objects and shapes
- Create stunning presentations with options other programs just don’t provide
- Sharing your drawings is very simple with a broad array of import/export options
- Annotate and detail your drawings using the detailing suite in VectorWorks Architect
- Extensive symbol libraries ship with Architect so you don’t have to draw your instruments from scratch
- Visualizing designs in is a breeze using a series of commands and rendering options available with the add on, Renderworks
The following are real-world system recommendations for running Vectorworks 2012. In some demanding cases, we would suggest a more capable machine than is described by these recommendations. Likewise, there are some less demanding situations where Vectorworks will perform well on older hardware. The Vectorworks user experience is always improved by faster processors and additional RAM.
General Recommendations
Macintosh
- Mac OS X 10.5.7 or later
- QuickTIme
- Intel Core 2GHz or better
- DVD-ROM drive [dual layer]
- Screen Resolution 1024 X 768 minimum, 1280 X 800 recommended
- Display colour depth - 15 bit or higher
Windows
- Windows XP SP 3, Windows Vista SP 2, Windows 7
- QuickTime 7.6.0 to 7.6.9 [higher versions not recommended]
- Pentium 2GHz or better
- DVD-ROM drive [dual layer]
- Screen Resolution 1024 x 768 minimum, 1280 x 800 recommended
- Display colour depth - 15 bit or higher
RAM 1GB minimum, 4GB recommended .
Video Cards
IMPORTANT - Vectorworks 2009 introduced a completely new document interaction interface which depends on a high bandwidth interface between the CPU and the screen. This has the potential to provide a very fast and fluid screen interface if used on appropriate hardware or a noticeably slower interface if used on the wrong hardware. It is especially important to choose a CPU and video card which are current-generation if you use Vectorworks on a very high resolution 30" monitor. Some users may be dissatisfied with 30" monitors when used with older generation processors or video cards. In general, starting with Vectorworks 2009, the more powerful your video card is, the better your Vectorworks experience will be.
We strongly recommend that all users check that their video drivers are current. Most functional problems have been traced to older video drivers during our testing.
Please also note that, while modern GeForce cards on the Mac generally behave pretty well with sufficient VRAM, some users have reported stability and performance problems with older NVIDIA GeForce 6800 and 7300 cards starting with MacOS 10.5.6, even when using the most up-to-date drivers. While some users may experience acceptable performance using these cards, we recommend using a more modern NVIDIA card for those users who use NVIDIA cards.
Remote and Virtual Machines
We do not consider remote login environments such as Remote Desktop, Terminal Services and VNC or virtual machine environments such as Parallels and VMware to be appropriate for regular work, so Vectorworks performance in these situations is not of primary concern to us. They may be appropriate for administrative testing or utility purposes, and Vectorworks is fully functional in these environments. You should not expect high performance in these environments, however, especially with interactive screen feedback.
We do support Vectorworks running under Bootcamp on Intel Macs. As long as you have appropriate and current drivers for the hardware on your machine, you can expect fast and reliable Vectorworks behavior.
Maintenance Releases
Unless there is a known problem with a maintenance release of the operating system, we recommend the latest maintenance release at the time we ship a new release of Vectorworks as a minimum because that is what we test with. If you have problems with an earlier maintenance release, we will often ask you to update as an initial troubleshooting step.
On Windows, we recommend against updating QuickTime primarily because most Windows users are not aware that Vectorworks depends on QuickTime and can possibly change behavior when QuickTime is updated. We have never had problems, however, which were traced back to bugs in newer releases of QuickTime, so updating QuickTime on Windows is not a risky choice.
64 Bit Windows
While Vectorworks is fully supported in both 32 bit and 64 bit Windows environments, we generally recommend using a 64 bit Windows operating system for Vectorworks 2012.
While Renderworks is fully supported in both 32 bit and 64 bit Windows environments, we strongly recommend using a 64 bit Windows operating system for Renderworks 2012, as it will take full use of 64 bit addressing.
Optimizing Performance
RAM requirements are usually driven by performance considerations. Large files and especially complex rendering modes consume large amounts of memory. On the Mac the operating system will take advantage of nearly all of the RAM that you have up to 4GB. On Windows the operating system will by default only take advantage of 2G of RAM, but can be coerced into using up to 3G. For users who have 64 bit machines and work with large files and complex renderings, we recommend installing 8G of RAM to give the rest of your system more RAM breathing space when Vectorworks is approaching the maximum. When RAM runs out, Vectorworks usually continues to function, but is slowed significantly by the need to access the hard drive to provide virtual memory. Extreme lack of RAM may cause operations to generate errors in cases where given sufficient RAM they would otherwise succeed. Faster hard drives can have an unexpectedly large impact on system performance especially when virtual memory is actively being used.
RAM requirements are usually driven by performance considerations. Large files and especially complex rendering modes consume large amounts of memory. When RAM runs out, Vectorworks usually continues to function, but is slowed significantly by the need to access the hard drive to provide virtual memory. Extreme lack of RAM may cause operations to generate errors in cases where given sufficient RAM they would otherwise succeed. Faster hard drives can have an unexpectedly large impact on system performance especially when virtual memory is actively being used.
Faster or slower processor clock speeds have a predictable impact on Vectorworks performance. We choose our recommendation based on our perception of mainstream needs and the current available hardware.
Hard drive size requirements are driven by the total size of Designer with Renderworks including all content files. You can easily reduce this size by opting to not install some Vectorworks content files.
