I saw this AutoCAD Visual Styles Survey posted on David Harringnton's blog and rushed to have my say. I'm considering 64 Bit Operating Systems for the 2010 Deployments as our larger projects are pushing 32 Bit memory allocation limits. It's mostly Visual Styles and Rendering that hit the red line.
Our AutoCAD Architecture files are small in real terms, 3 or 4 MB, but because of the density of fittings and store size can happily eat more than 3GB of memory in a 3D view with visual styles. Rendering on any platform can have similar problems.
Although it's entirely unsupported, not recommended and not for production I've tried the 64 Bit applications on the Windows 7 Beta. It's been impressive and proved that memory allocation problems will be resolved. Time to build a real Vista 64 Bit deployment, complicated by the business still being XP, and see if all the other stuff works.
If you use visual styles voice share compliments and concerns in the survey (there is room for both). If you don't use them do it anyway and tell the product team why!
AutoCAD Product Design and Usability Group would appreciate your feedback and input on using Visual Styles in AutoCAD and other applications.
Who Should Participate?
Any AutoCAD user who uses Visual Styles, custom styles or effects in AutoCAD and is familiar with similar features in other applications.
What Are We Looking For?
The Goal of this survey is to gather usage-specific data and user-specific preferences for Visual Styles, effects, and for the Adaptive Degradation features.
Visual Styles in AutoCAD Survey:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=xI7NZwH2pLhkPZVlxxhU6w_3d_3d
Survey will be active: March 26- April 3, 2009.
