Wednesday, March 29, 2023 5:25 pm3 Comments

• News

Some two years and four months the first Mac to feature an Apple Silicon SoC was released, Autodesk has finally updated Maya and AutoCAD to run natively on Apple’s M1 and M2 family of SoCs.

Apple’s M2 Max features 67 billion transistors, 400GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, and up to 96GB of fast, low-latency unified memory.

Samuel Axon for Ars Technica:

Like other major AutoCAD updates, [AutoCAD for Mac 2024] adds new features like expanded automation tools and easier workflows, but the announcement that “for the first time, AutoCAD for Mac 2024 and AutoCAD LT for Mac 2024 now run natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon architectures, including M1 and M2 chips in the M-series chips” is clearly the headlining feature.

Autodesk claims that Apple Silicon support “can increase overall performance by up to two times” compared to the 2023 version of AutoCAD.

On March 29, Autodesk revealed the 2024 update for Maya, its 3D modeling software chiefly used in game development, film production, and visual effects. Maya 2024 brings native Apple Silicon support in addition to a slew of new features, including the LookDevX material editor, Hydra support, and so on.

But in contrast to many other makers of widespread professional software in similar industries, such as Adobe and Unity, Autodesk’s efforts to support Apple Silicon — which were announced two years ago — have been ongoing for an interminably long time. Even open source Maya competitor Blender beat Autodesk to the punch.

MacDailyNews Take: However belated it may be, welcome to the future, Autodesk!

More about the new versions here:
• AutoCAD
• Maya

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