AC27 IntelMacs: 3D view causes the freezing of all views

[Romans]

This misbehavior started with the AC27 Technical Preview and is still happening in the now available final release:

Opening the 3D view or selecting something in the 3D view, or changing something in the 3D view almost always leads to the freeze of all open views. Sooner than later. No more interaction within the views is possible.

Saving and also BIMcloud operations (Send and receive, release all, etc.) are still possible.

But only a restart of Archicad resolves that issue.

It is a problem mainly (only?) happening on Intel-based Macs.

And yes, 3D Antialiasing (with Hardware antialiasing mode) and the new Physically based renderer in 3D Window (Work Environment settings) are turned off.

Also, miscellaneous MacOS systems make no difference.

Any news /workarounds about this critical problem?

A 3D application without the option to work in the 3D view is rather weird.

[Romans]

Unbelievable....knowing there is a working fix already developed!

[Rex Maximilian]

Actually, After rechecking their email, I had to revise my post above as the expected date is even further out than I initially stated. It's now March or April.

[DGSketcher]

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@Rex Maximilian wrote:

Actually, After rechecking their email, I had to revise my post above as the expected date is even further out than I initially stated. It's now March or April.

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That will be the AC28 Beta then? 😠

[Romans]

Maybe they have a deal with Apple to support the phasing out of the Intel Macs. I wonder...

[DGSketcher]

Well it is 3 years (11/2020) since the M1 launch, and given the world's current rate of tech development & redundancy I would not be surprised by GS taking a hard line in their own interests to cease support for Mactel versions of AC, even without Apple motivation. Although, it is only as recent as AC26 that GS provided Apple Silicon "compatibility", so I can imagine it might hack a few people off to be told out of the blue AC27 or even AC28 were the last supported versions of Mactel.

It would be nice if someone from GS would give some insight as to what is happening, so that we can plan our hardware replacement and funding. It would also help if this link had a refresh: https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Installation-update/Archicad-for-Apple-silicon/ta-p/304108

@Tamas Gaspar 

[Romans]

Already AC27 is NOT fully compatible with Intel Macs (with AMD graphics). So the shift away has started since AC27 Tech Prev.

But what I do not really understand is why the already developed fix is not released yet to us?

[Greg Kmethy · Accepted solution]

Dear all,

Let me recap what has happened so far and what are we doing to address this issue:

The issue was first detected during the Archicad 27 Technology Preview. Our tests showed that it occurs inconsistently on some Intel-based Macs with specific hardware specs and is video card-related. Our tests suggested that turning antialiasing off is a workaround for the problem. Therefore, we released Archicad 27 in September with antialiasing turned off by default and with a built-in mechanism to report if this problem still occurs.

Soon after the official release it became clear that the problem is still happening at multiple sites. We involved Apple in the investigation as the problem seemed limited to certain hardware. It still seemed antialiasing-related, so we released Archicad 27.1.0 with a safety protocol included that force-disables this feature (regardless of work environment settings) if a computer failed. We saw that the safety protocol mitigates the issue, but does not solve it completely.

Meanwhile, our research with the help of Apple developers found a possible permanent fix that works regardless of the antialiasing setting. We needed external validation for this fix. This is quite unusual, but since in our internal tests turning off antialiasing was enough, we needed to see the fix in effect on customer's computers that still had the problem. The validation concluded successfully - all external validators confirmed that it works. Unfortunately, this was not in time for the release of 27.1.1.

We are now integrating this validated fix in our Archicad code base in all language versions. The next update (planned for February) will contain this fix, but  we will start distributing the fix to affected users sooner than that.

We apologize for everyone who is affected by this issue and thank those who assisted us validating the fix!

[DGSketcher]

@Greg Kmethy Thank you for responding here. It is appreciated. It isn't much fun trying to work with a situation where you aren't sure if there is a software fix coming or being faced with a potentially expensive hardware write off.

[torben_wadlinger]

Let me recap: GS knew about this issue and decided to release AC27 without any warning of this error! GS is lucky that we are just architects, not attorneys! If we were attorneys we would sue GS to the ground.

[thesleepofreason]

Yes - even though it is nice to finally see an official response here it's impossible not to feel disbelief when reading it as GS blatant disregard for users is spelled out.