iMac system requirements for Archicad 22

[Anonymous]

Looking to purchase a 2nd hand iMac until my business makes me enough money for me to invest in the latest and greatest. Question on system requirements for ArchiCAD 22.. attached is the computer with specs I am looking at buying. Can anyone confidently confirm these are enough to run 22? I will be running the program as a subscription until I have enough cash to buy the program outright.

[Lingwisyer]

What kind of projects do you work on? How big / complex? It meets the requirements to run, but being able to run and being workable are not always to same thing...

https://helpcenter.graphisoft.com/knowledgebase/25883/?_ga=2.163979071.125020311.1560128599-39776965...



Ling.

[Karl Ottenstein]

As a nearly 7 year old machine, it's specs are kind of low. It can be upgraded to Catalina this fall:
https://www.macrumors.com/2019/06/03/macos-catalina-compatibility/

but based on Apple's recent history, it probably can't be upgraded beyond that in the future. The graphics card is probably OK for just ARCHICAD work, but wouldn't be powerful enough if you want to use Twinmotion.

A super low price would be the only reason to consider a machine this old. If this is your only machine, I would look for something at least a little newer, and ideally with an SSD vs an old (and likely to fail at this age) spinning disk.

[Erwin Edel]

Apple is not really supporting Nvidia for Mojave and most likely beyond.

I would not consider it a purchase for the future.

[Da3dalus]

I can say from experience that you may waste a lot of time making it work. I have a great work laptop, but I wanted to push my home Mac Pro as far as it would go, since there isn't much of a reason to invest in something new for occasional use.

It's a 2008 machine with an nVidia graphics card. ArchiCAD 21 works fine on OS X 10.11 El Capitan, but ArchiCAD 22 does not. Since Apple is no longer supporting that Mac Pro for later operating systems (although the specs are still competitive), I had to hack it. After many hours, it does indeed run 10.13 High Sierra (and even did 10.14 Mohave for a time), but ArchiCAD 22 still won't run... it just crashes on startup.

For me, it's kind of a hobby, but if you're depending on it for income, don't waste your time on anything more than 4 years old. If money is a real issue, you can always (*gasp*) go with an inexpensive Windows machine. ArchiCAD gives you that freedom. Once you start raking in the dough, you can go back to Mac!

[Erwin Edel]

Chuck, as far as I can tell there are issues with most Nvidia GPU and Mojave, you might want to try rolling back to High Sierra.

It's very frustrating, with Catalina already on the horizon.

I have a late 2013 model iMac at home and still have that on High Sierra too. We have two macbooks with Nvidia cards here at the office, that run AC22 fine, but also still on High Sierra.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Da3dalus wrote:
It's a 2008 machine with an nVidia graphics card. ..

Sorry to the OP for continuing on this MacPro 2008 tangent...

Chuck, I have an early 2008 Mac Pro as well, now my spare. I had replaced the delivered graphics card with an ATI 5770 back in 2010 and had no problems running anything - and with much better performance than the original Nvidia. This card is under $ 200 ... but there may be a newer card that is also compatible with the old Mac Pro. (I also bumped memory and SSD which give it perfectly adequate performance for over a 10 year life through High Sierra and AC 21. Haven't turned it on since 22 arrived to know if it would run.)

[Anonymous]

I have a MAC PRO 5.1 that runs AC21 fine. My machine seems to meet the specs necessary to run AC22, however I am having numerous issues with partial freezes, tool lock ups and delays when trying to run AC22.

My current video card is a NAVIDA GeForce GTX 780 3072 MB (OPEN GL 4.3). Would updating the video card to a newer card such as the Navidia GTX 1080 8GB or Radon RX-580 8GB improve performance with AC22. Anyone else experience problems when moving from AC21 to AC22?

Would appreciate any suggestions or comments. Love working in AC but AC22 is nearly unusable... need to find a solution.

MAC PRO MID 2012
PROCESSOR 2x 3.46 6- Core Intel Xeon
MEMORY  128GB
GRAPHICS  NAVIDA GeForce GTX 780 3072 MB

OS High Siera 10.13.6