Acad 2013

Hey Everyone,

What are your thoughts on Acad 2013? I recently had my workstation upgraded in a last ditch effort to resolve a memory issue with autocad, and although it is overall much smoother, Acad is still unresponsive quite a bit. It seems to resolve itself now within 20 seconds or so (before it would just crash), but I am getting hang ups when switching between layouts or rescaling viewports. Is anyone else getting similar issues? Any fixes or rumors or patches coming out?

I doubt that you'll see any hot fixes or updates come out this soon to the initial release date.

What "upgrade" did you make to your workstation?

There are many reasons why AutoCAD may be slow or unresponsive that have nothing to do with the actual program itself and more to do with how you work.

I've been told we are getting upgraded company wide on the 20th of April. Those who already have it have seen it create bugs in AutoCAD 2011, which is the latest release my company has.

As well as using 2012 in the office for my day job I am a part time student so have an educational license at home and have been playing with 2013 for a few days.

Initial thoughts are that it has incremental improvements much like the previous few releases. Some of these are bigger tweaks than others but generally I like small changes often rather than a piece of software that has massive changes every 5 years or so.

For me the most promising new feature is the ability to generate 2D drawings from 3D models. I work in the theatre industry in London and no two sets are the same. It is very useful to 'build' the set in 3D to foresee any problems that may be encountered on stage where time is at a premium.

I also need to produce 2D construction drawings for the carpenters and engineers so the facility to generate these drawings from a model is very useful. Up til now I've used the 'flatshot' command extensively but the new section and detail tools look very promising and I'm sure they'll improve it in future releases...

Anyone else had a play with these features yet? What do you reckon?

Hi RyanAtNelco

I've written up my thoughts on AutoCAD 2013 here:

http://cadsetterout.com/reviews/introduction-to-autocad-2013/

I've had problems with the last few releases of AutoCAD wanting to use more from the graphics card. This is OK if you've got a graphics card! Make sure that your drivers are up to date, try toggling hardware acceleration on and off and turn off graphics hungry features such as transparency.

Let us know how you get on!

Paul H,

I am an ex-Theatre draughtsman & scenery builder

Pablo,

Great stuff on your site and a cracking bit of writing on 2013...agree very much with what you say there.

Funny, I was a scenery builder too for 20+ years and gradually moved into draughting (currently at the NT). What you say about 2D/ 3D draughting really resonates!

Wouldn't surprise me if we've worked together at some point...

NT eh! Lucky old you

I left Scenery behind to pursue a full time career in draughting. Luckily I have found work with a company that specializes in Museum Interiors, so it is still very 'scenic' but it is intended to be there for some time rather than being skipped after two weeks!

The kind of stuff you draw up must have changed a lot over the last 20 years!