What software to learn first

Not sure about that. I have a GTX 780 running SW perfectly. In a VM no less. You just need anything better than a stock ‘on-board’ video card and something with dedicated VRAM (1GB or better) Other in than that you’re golden.

Workstation graphics cards apparently help, but they aren’t required. As far as I understand it, SolidWorks does the majority of its processing on the CPU. The graphics card is apparently used to render the viewport and do final renderings, but I can’t tell if it’s being used for anything else.

If I increase the detail level of a model I can hear my CPU cooler spin up (sometimes for half a minute or so), but the cooler on the graphics card stays steady (as far as I can perceive). I have a high end workstation graphics card, so I’m assuming it would be utilized if SolidWorks was capable of it.

One thing you will miss out on if you don’t have a “workstation” card is something called “RealView Graphics”, which makes the viewport look better.

So, the short version is: you probably aren’t going to be running it effectively on a netbook, but a desktop with a decent video card should get you by.

A three-button mouse is basically required, but here’s a vid of it technically running on an original Surface Pro.

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Hey all. Appreciate this thread. Not very tech savvy here.

Just to clarify above posts, can I use Sketch Up alone to create, save and print to the Glowforge? Or do I also need to be able to export it to Inkscape to create the PDF files?(as @polarbrainfreeze did)

Looking for a lower learning curve to be able to engrave/cut plywood, acrylic shapes for scale modeling.

Thanks

You can do most of your creating in Sketch Up, usually folks just drop the results into Inkscape for conversion and resave it as an SVG format file. (If Sketch Up exports SVG or PDF files you can skip that step, but if not, it’s one step and not difficult.)

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