Anyone running Altium & Windows 10 (on M1)

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DavidE7

Member
Hi,

Anyone running Altium successfully under Parallels or VmWare Fusion?

I'm on a new iMac i7 Retina, 40GB RAM, Radeon Pro 580 8192 MB
  • Paralells Desktop v13 + Windows 10 Pro
  • 4 cores & 16GB assigned to the PC
  • Graphics setting: best for retina, 3D acceleration: DirectX 10

Even though the hardware is quite extreme It's very slow and laggy. I would expect things to be smooth...

Thoughts?


ps. tried a few settings like DirectX9, various scaling options in paralells & windows, but non seem to solve this issue.
 
I had happily been using AD17 on iMac 27 with 32GB under Parallels 13 and Windows 7. Aside from Mac/Windows keyboard issues I found it worked just as well it does on native PC / Windows 7 platform. Unfortunately when I "upgraded" to AD18 the wheels fell off and now AD18 crashes immediately whenever I attempt File Open or any other command that opens a Windows Explorer dialog. Have you been using AD17 or AD18 with Windows 10?
 
Damn, this is my experience as well. I've been happily using AD17 in parallels forever, but now that I'm back to it for the first time in a while and trying to use AD18, I can't so much as open a layout. Schematic does seem to work about as well as ever.
 
I reluctantly upgraded to Windows 10 and have not had any issues with AD18 since. The problems I encountered with Windows 7 occurred whenever AD18 accessed ntdll.dll. From what I've seen the performance improvements promised by AD18 have not materialized but I don't see any difference when using it with Parallels 13/ Windows 10 compared to Windows 7.
 
For what it's worth, I have zero reasons to recommend Win 7 over 10. It's new and different on the surface, for sure, but everything under the hood seems so much better and more consistent.

In my case, the machine in question hadn't been used in a bit over a year, so Win10, OSX, and Parallels were all quite out of date. As of my post above, Win10 was mostly updated, but not Parallels or OSX. After upgrading from Parallels 11 to 13 and fully updating Win10, everything seems to be back to normal function - not sure if it's worse or better than 17 yet since I haven't dug in too hard, but it's not horribly borked. No more crashes, and when I open a board layout, I can navigate it without threatening my computer with violence.

Updating OSX from 10.11 to 10.13 doesn't seem to have had any impact either way, so that's good.
 
Well, I can report an update: Unfortunately, it seems that Altium makes such extensive use of DirectX that performance actually is pretty badly degraded. Not unusable, but where AD17 felt near-native, AD18 is definitely noticeably WAY faster when using boot camp.

Parallels implements DirectX by translating DX API calls to equivalent OpenGL calls. I know VMWare Fusion now as of 10 uses OSX Metal APIs. I'm not sure if they do the same call translation or what, but it seems to me that it might be faster. I'll probably try a VM running under Fusion to see if that's any better.
 
Waking up this thread. From Altium 18, now Altium 19, things got terribly slow and I get a lot of odd rendering glitches in the 3D view of altium. Polygons rendering in the wrong order, things like that.

Team parallels, what is the reason to this? Altium says DirectX 10 or better, why isn't this supported by Parallels yet?
 
I have a MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017) 15GB, Radeon Pro unit. I have happily run Parallels and Altium on it the past two years. I must comment that Altium 19.1.6 is very slow lately. The bad thing is I don't know who to blame it on as Parallels recently updated to 15.0.0 and Altium recently updated 19.1.6. Because of my dislike of Altium 19 I typically use Altium 16.1.12 which is very nice and fast ( faster than a 8-Core PC ). I only run Altium 19 when generating STEP files as of late and that is why I can't comment on what the smoking gun is to the slow speed.

I would too appreciate finding out what I can do to increase the speed of Altium 19.
 
Altium says version 19 is different from prior versions. "AD19 uses different video calls than AD16." - Directly from a Customer Service email. I may have to downgrade to Parallels 14 because this issue came up with Parallels 15 and the folks at Parallels claimed they made DirectX improvements.

Cary
 
I also reported this to Parallels.

They would like to collect technical data.

"Please reproduce the issue and collect technical data report along with the screenshot then reply to this email with the ID number using the below article.

http://kb.parallels.com/9058"

The bad thing is I got annoyed and downgraded to Parallels 14 so I can't 100% reproduce the situation again unless I upgraded again to Parallels 15.
 
SOLIDWORKS PCB(powered by Altium) user here. I had the same issues when using parallels desktop v15. Now I went ahead and downgraded to v14 and everything seems to be working just fine now. This leads me to believe that it is an issue with parallels v15. I hope this gets figured out and fixed soon!
 
Running a 2019 Mac book Pro, Parallels 15, Altium 2019 and having issues every 5 mins. If anyone has any good suggestions for how to run this combination I am all ears!
 
SteveG17.
What kind of problems?
I still run a fairly successful Parallels experience. ( Fairly successful - I still have a mirror glitch once in a while, but to be honest - way less than a standard PC. ) OrCad, Genesys, Altium and other programs, even FlexLM Dongled licensed software and specialized software using USB. In one of the recent versions, Parallels did fix issues that prevented a useful experience with Altium 19.
One thing I want to point out is I feel that Parallel's other tools interfere with Parallels itself. I have no solid proof. I can just comment that I experience more issues when Parallels Toolkit is running, especially the memory cleanup tool. I have never reported this theory to Parallels.
Explain your issues further, it may help us out with your troubleshooting.
 
SteveG17 said:
Running a 2019 Mac book Pro, Parallels 15, Altium 2019 and having issues every 5 mins. If anyone has any good suggestions for how to run this combination I am all ears!
Click to expand...
Hello, could you please share with us more detailed description? Screenshot of any error/warning will be very helpful also.
Thank in advance.
 
I have rendering issues with all versions of Altium since version 18. Orthographic 3D rendering works but perspective 3D rendering fails. Se attached images. Holes are not rendered properly and sik screen is not visible in perspective mode.
Does anyone know how to fix this?
I use parallels version 16.0.0 (48916), iMac (27-inch, Late 2013), Mojave 10.14.6 and Windows 10 (with all updates).
 

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Any resolution on the Parallels rendering issues? My configuration crashes the VM with flashing random graphics within a couple minutes of PCB work. I'm running the latest Parallels version 16.1.3 Pro on a 16" MacBook Pro with the latest macOS Big Sur Version 11.2.2. To keep in-sync with the rest of my design team I'm running Windows 10 Pro Version 2004, OS build 19041.685 with Altium Designer Version 21.0.8. I've optimized the best I can with 8 cores and 48GB of RAM. I've tried both Parallels and Apple virtualization settings, but Altium is still unusable under Parallels.
 
Parallels pointed an upgrade to me a couple of months ago and I have been using this setup successfully.

I have been very careful not to download every Altium update there is so I may be a few minor releases behind but this system is pretty stable.

MBP 16" 32GB MacOS 11.2.1
Parallels 16.1.3 (4916)
Settings:
Configured for Games Only
8 Core
20480 MB
Apple Hypervisor
Adaptive Hypervisor Checked
Video Auto
Always Use High-Performance Graphics Checked​
Altium 20.2.6 (Build 244)
Windows 10.0.18363

upload_2021-3-2_18-6-47.png

upload_2021-3-2_18-7-31.png

upload_2021-3-2_18-8-29.png
upload_2021-3-2_18-12-33.png
​
 
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