The following are real-world system requirements for running Vectorworks 2021. In some demanding cases, we would suggest a more capable machine than is described in these hardware profiles. Likewise, there are some less demanding situations where Vectorworks will perform well on older hardware.
General Requirements
Operating Systems
macOS 10.15 (Catalina)
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macOS 10.14 (Mojave)
macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)
For Vectorworks 2012, the minimum requirement for the Macintosh is Mac OS 10.5.7 running on an Intel processor. General Recommendations Macintosh: Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 Mac OS X 10.6 Mac OS X 10.7 Mac OS X 10.8 Other Software: QuickTime Processor: Intel Core 2GHz or better Other Hardware: DVD-ROM drive (dual layer) Screen Resolution: Recommended: 1280x800 Minimum. Windows Server 2012 or later Windows 10 64-bit Note. We do support Vectorworks running under Boot Camp on Mac machines. As long as you have appropriate and current drivers for the hardware on your machine, you can expect fast and reliable Vectorworks behavior.
macOS 10.12 (Sierra)
Windows 10 64-bit
Minimum Hardware Profile
Entry-level Profile:
For small projects, simple models/drawings with a low level of detail, simple renderings (such as, small residential projects, small theaters, small landscaping design)
Processor:
Intel Core i5 or AMD Ryzen 5, or better
RAM:
8GB or more
Graphics Card:
OpenGL 2.1 compatible graphics card with 2GB of VRAM or more
Some integrated graphics cards such as Intel Iris graphics are acceptable for simple models/drawings, but a dedicated graphics card is preferable.
Vision requires a dedicated OpenGL 4.1 compatible graphics card with 2GB of VRAM or more, preferably released in the past three years (e.g. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 series, AMD Radeon RX 500 series).
Using multiple view panes with different visibilities in all panes requires a graphics card with at least 2GB of VRAM.
Display Resolution:
1440 x 900 or higher
Hard Disk:
10GB free disk space is required for the installation. 30GB or more is required for a full installation with all libraries.
Case sensitive file system volumes are not supported.
Recommended Hardware Profiles
High-end Profile:
For large projects, complex and very detailed models/drawings, complex renderings (such as large BIM projects, large entertainment venues, commercial sites, GIS, high end landscaping design, photorealistic rendering)
Processor:
3.0+ GHz Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 7 with eight cores, or better
RAM:
32GB or more
Graphics Card:
A dedicated OpenGL 2.1 compatible graphics card with 8GB of VRAM or more
Vision requires a dedicated OpenGL 4.1 compatible graphics card with 8GB of VRAM or more, preferably released in the past three years (e.g. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 TI series, AMD Radeon RX 5000 series).
Display Resolution:
1920 x 1080 or higher
Hard Disk:
10GB free disk space is required for the installation. 30GB or more is required for a full installation with all libraries.
Case sensitive file system volumes are not supported.
Installing Vectorworks on flash storage (SSD) is recommended.
Mid-level Profile:
For medium-size projects, complex models/drawings with medium level of details (such as small commercial projects, mid-size entertainment venues, residential site modeling)
Processor:
2.0+ GHz Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 7 with six cores, or better
RAM:
16GB or more
Graphics Card:
A dedicated OpenGL 2.1 compatible graphics card with 3GB of VRAM or more
Vision requires a dedicated OpenGL 4.1 compatible graphics card with 4GB or VRAM or more, preferably released in the past three years (e.g. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 series, AMD Radeon RX Vega series).
Using multiple view panes with different visibilities in all panes requires a graphics card with at least 3GB of VRAM, with 4GB or more recommended for large files.
Display Resolution:
1920 x 1080 or higher
Hard Disk:
10GB free disk space is required for the installation. 30GB or more is required for a full installation with all libraries.
Case sensitive file system volumes are not supported.
Installing Vectorworks on flash storage (SSD) is recommended.
Hardware Requirements for Project Sharing Server
Operating System:
Windows Server 2012 or later
Windows 10 64-bit
Note:
Users installing the Project Sharing Server on a Windows machine will need to install vc_redist.x64.exe for Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019:
macOS 10.15 (Catalina)
macOS 10.14 (Mojave)
macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)
macOS 10.12 (Sierra)
Note: Project Sharing Server can also be installed on any system that supports Docker such as Network-Attached Storage (NAS) devices.
Processor:
64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo or better
RAM:
4GB or more
Hard Drive:
A flash storage (SSD) is recommended.
Case sensitive file system volumes are not supported.
Network Requirements for Project Sharing
Project sharing requires high-speed network connections. As the network bandwidth increases, so does project sharing performance. Slower network speeds can still provide a satisfactory user experience if you minimize operations that transfer large amounts of data over the network (such as committing changes to the project file or refreshing a local working file).
Server-based LAN Sharing:
Minimum: A Fast Ethernet (100Mbit/s) network connection with minimum 50Mbit/s on upload.
Recommended: A Gigabit Ethernet (1Gbit/s) network connection is required for large projects.
Firewalls should allow network ports used by the Project Sharing Server. The default port is 22001. It is configurable during installation.
The network must support HTTP 1.1 standard.
Server-based LAN Sharing is the recommended method of sharing for teams on the same LAN.
File-based LAN Sharing:
Minimum: A Fast Ethernet (100Mbit/s) network connection
Recommended: A Gigabit Ethernet (1Gbit/s) network connection is required for large projects.
Cloud Sharing:
Project sharing using cloud-based storage requires a high-speed internet connection (50Mbit/s or above).
This method of sharing works best with small teams or small projects. It is not recommended for large teams or large projects. You can expect significant speed improvements when using Dropbox with LAN sync enabled. It is the preferred cloud-based sharing solution for project sharing.
Hard Drive:
Storing project files on flash storage (SSD) is recommended.
Hardware Requirements for Site Protection Server (network license manager)
Operating System:
Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 or later
Windows 10 64-bit
macOS 10.15 (Catalina)
macOS 10.14 (Mojave)
macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)
Processor:
64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo or better
RAM:
4GB or more
Hard Drive:
30MB free disk space is required for installation.
Case sensitive file system volumes are not supported.
Additional Details
Graphics Cards
IMPORTANT – Several Vectorworks features have placed higher demands on graphic hardware. Additionally, the performance and quality of the graphics provided by the Vectorworks Graphics Module depend directly on the speed, memory, and supported extensions of the graphics card. These features have the potential to provide a very fast and fluid experience if used on capable hardware, or a noticeably slower experience if used on older or incompatible hardware. Graphics cards should support at a minimum OpenGL version 2.1; cards not meeting this recommendation will not work. In general, the more powerful your graphics card is, the better your Vectorworks experience will be.
The amount of Video RAM (VRAM) required to drive Vectorworks adequately depends largely on the size of the display being used and the complexity of the Vectorworks document. Medium-sized displays with a native resolution of 1920x1080 or less should be driven by a graphics card with at least 2GB of VRAM. Larger displays should use a modern graphics card with at least 3GB of VRAM, with 4GB or more recommended.
OpenGL rendering of shadows and edges are VRAM-intensive and require at least 2GB, with 4GB of VRAM or more being preferable. If you want to take full advantage of OpenGL shadows and edges, especially in situations where you have any combination of the following:
- many lights
- point lights
- image textures
- anti-aliasing
- high shadow quality
- excessive geometry
OpenGL rendering of shadows and edges are VRAM-intensive and require at least 2GB, with 4GB of VRAM or more being preferable. If you want to take full advantage of OpenGL shadows and edges, especially in situations where you have any combination of the following:
- many lights
- point lights
- image textures
- anti-aliasing
- high shadow quality
- excessive geometry
and if you have a graphics card with less than 2GB of VRAM, you should consider upgrading your graphics card.
Using Multiple View Panes with different visibilities in all panes can be VRAM-intensive and require at least 2GB of VRAM, with 3GB or more recommended for large Vectorworks documents.
We strongly recommend that all users check that their video drivers are current. The majority of display problems reported to our Technical Support department have been traced to older video drivers. In general, a recent graphics card running the latest drivers is preferable to an old high-end graphics card running outdated drivers.
Vision requires a dedicated OpenGL 4.1 compatible graphics card, preferably released in the past three years. We do not recommend any integrated Intel video chipset. While Vision may run under these environments, we do not support them due to their lack of performance and speed. We recommend gaming cards over workstation cards for Vision due to the higher clock speed.
For the latest information on our graphics card recommendations and for other hardware recommendations, go to the Quality-Tested Hardware page.
Vectorworks may be used in conjunction with real-time rendering engines which have their own demanding hardware requirements. For example see Lumion: https://support.lumion.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003476753-Which-graphics-card-do-you-need-
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 Boot Camp on Mac machines. 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.
Optimizing Performance:
For users who work with large files and complex renderings, we recommend running with at least 16GB of RAM. 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 a large impact on system performance especially when virtual memory is actively being used.
Several tasks in Vectorworks leverage multiple CPU cores. Faster or slower processor clock speeds also have a predictable impact on Vectorworks performance. Hard drive size requirements are driven by the total size of Vectorworks including all content files. You can reduce this size by opting to not install some of the larger Vectorworks content files.
Project Sharing and Network Bandwidth:
The performance of Vectorworks when working on a shared project over the network will depend on the available network bandwidth. If the network bandwidth is insufficient, operations that transfer large amount of data over the network will be slow.
We recommend at minimum a Fast Ethernet (100Mbit/s) network connection. For large projects, a Gigabit Ethernet (1Gbit/s) network is required for a fast and fluid experience.
Project sharing using cloud-based storages requires a high-speed internet connection (50Mbit/s or above). This method of sharing works best with small teams or small projects. It is not recommended for large teams or large projects. You can expect significant speed improvements when using Dropbox with LAN sync enabled. It is the preferred cloud-based sharing solution for project sharing.
Although project sharing requires high-speed network connections in general, slower network speeds can still provide a satisfactory user experience if you minimize operations that transfer large amounts of data over the network (such as committing changes to the project file or refreshing a local working file).
Examples of data transfer times during commit and refresh operations for different bandwidths and project file sizes are shown in the chart below.
Project File Size
Network Bandwidth (download/upload) Commit/Refresh Data Transfer Time
100 MB
50Mbit/s
~20s
100Mbit/s
~10s
1Gbit/s
~1s
500 MB
50Mbit/s
~100s
100Mbit/s
~50s
1Gbit/s
~5s
Vectorworks Free Download For Pc
1GB
50Mbit/s
~200s
100Mbit/s
~100s
1Gbit/s
![Vectorworks 2012 For Mac Vectorworks 2012 For Mac](https://pic.macw.com/pic/202002/14224317_2495301be4.jpeg)
~10s
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.
Important note: For Vectorworks 2012, the minimum requirement for the Macintosh is Mac OS 10.5.7 running on an Intel processor.
General Recommendations
Macintosh:
Operating System:
Mac OS X 10.5
Mac OS X 10.6
Vectorworks Student
Mac OS X 10.7
Mac OS X 10.8
Other Software:
QuickTime
Processor:
Intel Core 2GHz or better
Other Hardware:
DVD-ROM drive (dual layer)
Screen Resolution:
Recommended: 1280x800
Minimum: 1024x768
Display color depth:
15 bit or higher
Windows:
Operating System:
Windows XP SP 3
Windows Vista SP 2
Windows 7 SP 1
Other Software:
QuickTime 7.6 to 7.6.9
(higher versions not recommended)
Processor:
Pentium 2GHz or better
Other Hardware:
DVD-ROM drive (dual layer)
Screen Resolution:
Recommended: 1280x800
Minimum: 1024 x 768
Display color depth:
15 bit or higher
Product Requirements:
Vectorworks Fundamentals:
RAM: 1GB Minimum*, 2GB recommended
Hard drive space: 10GB free
Vectorworks Fundamentals plus Renderworks:
RAM: 2GB Minimum*, 4GB recommended
Hard drive space: 10GB free
Vectorworks Designer:
RAM: 1GB Minimum*, 2GB recommended
Hard drive space: 10GB free
Vectorworks Designer plus Renderworks:
RAM: 2GB Minimum*, 4GB recommended
Hard drive space: 10GB free
*See the discussion in the Optimizing Performance section below.
Additional Details
Video Cards:
Other Software:
QuickTime
Processor:
Intel Core 2GHz or better
Other Hardware:
DVD-ROM drive (dual layer)
Screen Resolution:
Recommended: 1280x800
Minimum: 1024x768
Display color depth:
15 bit or higher
Windows:
Operating System:
Windows XP SP 3
Windows Vista SP 2
Windows 7 SP 1
Other Software:
QuickTime 7.6 to 7.6.9
(higher versions not recommended)
Processor:
Pentium 2GHz or better
Other Hardware:
DVD-ROM drive (dual layer)
Screen Resolution:
Recommended: 1280x800
Minimum: 1024 x 768
Display color depth:
15 bit or higher
Product Requirements:
Vectorworks Fundamentals:
RAM: 1GB Minimum*, 2GB recommended
Hard drive space: 10GB free
Vectorworks Fundamentals plus Renderworks:
RAM: 2GB Minimum*, 4GB recommended
Hard drive space: 10GB free
Vectorworks Designer:
RAM: 1GB Minimum*, 2GB recommended
Hard drive space: 10GB free
Vectorworks Designer plus Renderworks:
RAM: 2GB Minimum*, 4GB recommended
Hard drive space: 10GB free
*See the discussion in the Optimizing Performance section below.
Additional Details
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 like the GeForce 8800GT for those users who use NVIDIA cards.
Any video card used with Vectorworks should have a minimum of 512MB dedicated (Non-shared) RAM.
Any video card used with Vectorworks should have a minimum of 512MB dedicated (Non-shared) RAM.
Strict Minimums:
The absolute software version requirements in order for Vectorworks to launch are often but not always more relaxed than our recommendations. Vectorworks 2012 requires the following as an absolute minimum:
Windows:
- Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP2, Windows 7 SP1, or later
- QuickTime 7.6.0
- All attached video monitors set to 15 bits per pixel or higher
Macintosh:
- Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later
- QuickTime 7.0
- All attached video monitors set to 15 bits per pixel or higher
We do not currently have strict runtime checks of other aspects of the machine configuration such as the processor architecture.
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 - 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.
With those recommendations having been made, we have noticed that drivers for 64 bit Windows can be somewhat more problematic than those for the more mainstream 32 bit versions of Windows. Should you choose to run 64 bit Windows you should make sure that you carefully choose your hardware and driver versions to avoid problems.
Optimizing Performance
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.
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.
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.
More Information
For the latest support information on Vectorworks 2012 go to the Vectorworks Knowledgebase and search for '2012'.