Running Fusion with Rosetta 2 on Apple ARM-based M1 Chipsets

[keqingsong]

July 5, 2023 Update 

Hello all, the current Insider Build of Fusion now has native Apple Silicon support, and as you read some of the latest comments in this thread, the results are looking great. Our goal is make it available to everyone by our next product update, which should be happening towards the end of the month. If you want to try it now, you can sign up to join our Insider Program, and get access to the Insider Build. Keep in mind that once you become a member, you are under NDA and cannot sharing information publicly, with the exception of this particular project since it is already public knowledge. 

Click this link to sign-up and join: https://www.autodesk.com/campaigns/fusion-360/insider-program

Thank you to those you have who've expressed interested and have been testing it! Please continue to let us know about your experiences. 
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November 23, 2022 Update

As you know we have been working closely with Apple on native support for Fusion on Apple Silicon Chipsets (i.e. M1 & M2). We are pleased to announce that we expect to achieve full native support by Summer of 2023.

As we have explained in this thread, the delay is a result of the need to ensure 100% compatibility between components from over 100 3rd party vendors including Autodesk.

If you want to access this functionality as soon as possible, please consider joining the Insider Program. If you have any questions on the topic please contact @Rajkumar.ilanchelian.

October 28, 2021 Update

Hey all, thanks again for the passionate discussion here. Even though we haven't chimed into this thread as much as we wanted, we are reading every single response and are actively working on getting Fusion to be natively supported on the new Apple chipset. Here's what I know from talking to the development teams: 
We are actively working on getting native support. This is still going to take some time because Fusion uses a multitude of services to work the way it does (Autodesk-owned as well as 3rd party) many of which are also not natively supported on M1 chipsets yet. We are collaborating closely with those teams to taking the necessary steps to ensure that the services we use are also natively supported. There is a lot of passion internally to get this done as well, so we definitely feel you. Again, I can't not say when this will happen, but as soon as we have something more concrete to share, we'll be sure to update you all. 

April 29, 2021 Update

We've been actively working on resolving the issues mentioned below and are glad to report that these issues no longer exist when running Fusion on the M1 chipset. We are also working closely with Apple and are in the process of certifying Fusion as 100% compatible running on M1 chipsets via Rosetta 2. 

In terms of running Fusion natively on the M1 chipset without Rosetta 2, we are still working towards this goal but is going to take some time to reach. We are confident to say that running Fusion on the M1 chipset via Rosetta 2 should be indistinguishable from running it on an Intel-based chipset, if not faster. 

If there are specific issues you've experience and are not mentioned below (strike-through items), please chime in and respond to this thread so we are aware and can look into it ASAP. Thank you for your continued support! 

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Apple's original press release 

We are delighted to see Fusion being featured in the most recent Apple ARM-based M1 Macbook Pro announcement. Although Fusion isn’t natively compatible on Apple’s new M1 chipset architecture yet, Rosetta 2 should enable you to run Fusion*. We will be sure to keep you posted on our progress towards support of Apple’s new line of chipsets.   

-  
   
* While much of Fusion 360 works as expected under Rosetta 2, we discovered that some Fusion 360 components were not yet compatible. If you run Fusion 360 using Rosetta 2, you may experience issues in these areas:  

·         Switching Team Hubs in the Data Panel  

·         Insert from McMaster-Carr  

·         Explore Generative Design and Electronics Cooling Simulation results  

·         ECAD Tool Libraries and Content Manager  

·         Local Simulation Solves utilizing NASTRAN  

If you rely on the impacted areas for your work, we recommend you to stay on Intel-based Macs until we have these issues sorted out.   

[nraynaud]

Thanks for the report. Did it get generally faster?

For things like fillets or patterns it's really slow on my expensive top of the line Intel macbook pro.

[matt.berggren]

Thanks for your post!  We haven’t yet benchmarked the performance of specific commands but it’s definitely something we will do when we have some additional HW in our testing pipeline.  As you might imagine, the *actual* hardware is still pretty hard to come by and though we have a strong partnership with Apple, it’s going to take some time for them to get into full-swing on the production front!  We have been involved in their early HW program but having the complete range of machines using the production-version of the M1 Silicon to test the various performance specs is being worked thru.  Once the have them deployed into our development / test environment, we will definitely do some benchmarking!

best regards,

matt berggren - autodesk

[TrippyLighting]

@nraynaud can you provide some examples of that behavior?

[nraynaud]

Hi, @TrippyLighting , here is a recent example, taken with ShakyPhone3000® the only screen grabber that also capture the various beach balls. Under F360, I put the processor view of the activity monitor, basically, the computer is bored while one core is running around the CSG graph to try to round corners.

It's not the worst example, but imagine in a big project, where you would be often editing before the pattern. This kind of situation happens a lot to me.

[TrippyLighting]

There was nothing attached or linked to your last post.

[nraynaud]

oops sorry, I'm a bit lost with this forum, I pasted a youtube video in the screencast URL.

https://youtu.be/78ttMwVq-L4

[tomjulier]

In a quick test I was able to use Insert from McMaster-Carr for a part, so that feature isn't completely broken at least.

[rknall]

Update to Beta 11.1 and Fusion 360 refuses to start on DTK hardware. Was running fine since now. Anyone experiences the same issues? Already tried a fresh reinstall and that did not work out as well.

[TrippyLighting]

So here's some food for thought:

you are creating a 8 x 8 pattern of 5 features. That results in 320 features that have to be calculated. Imagine you have a timeline with 320 features ...

I believe you are better off patterning geometry instead of features.

[Anonymous]

I have a surface pro x (gen 1) will that run either?

[Anonymous]

This is awesome to hear! Question I have with the improvements that the M1 chip shows are guys going with 8GB or 16GB of ram, if you primarily are going to use F360?

[lance.carocci]

---

@rknall wrote:

Update to Beta 11.1 and Fusion 360 refuses to start on DTK hardware. Was running fine since now. Anyone experiences the same issues? Already tried a fresh reinstall and that did not work out as well.

---

The preview hardware may be the actual cause here, and is part of what inspired this post. With a true-blue M1 chip, these problems have not been present.

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@Anonymous wrote:

I have a surface pro x (gen 1) will that run either?

---

Not at this time; Windows does not yet support emulation of x86_64 on ARM64, but it's my understanding that this should come to Insider Preview builds eventually, at which point I hope to give it a look. Even when it does, I would not expect Fusion 360 to be optimized around this scenario out of the gate.

[hanse1pk]

I have got the New Mac Mini M1 with 8G ram. I have opened and run Fusion 360. Have not had much time with it yet to see how it performs. I do think Autodesk does need to move away from OpenGL and update Interface in general to optimize and prevent obsolescence due to underlying code.

If they update to allow on M1 would hope to see full running Fusion on IPad even if limited to Pro as their is now mouse support for IPads as well. 

[jbrewlet]

I just got an M1 MacBook Pro and made a video installing Fusion 360 – check out that here: https://pdxc.co/f360-m1

TLDW - I saw no issues as of now other than what's listed in the original post.

[resoledv]

Hello 🙂 

I installed Fusion on a M1 Mac. The only thing that does not work for me is the saving window. Saving as a new file works, while normal saving does not. I can change the versions name but cannot check the milestone button and hitting the save button makes it darker while clicking but does not do anything.

Anyone else experiencing this issue?

[resoledv]

Hello 🙂 

I installed Fusion on a M1 Mac. The only thing that does not work for me is the saving window. Saving as a new file works, while normal saving does not. I can change the versions name but cannot check the milestone button and hitting the save button makes it darker while clicking but does not do anything.

Anyone else experiencing this issue?

[resoledv]

Hello 🙂 

I installed Fusion on a M1 Mac. The only thing that does not work for me is the saving window. Saving as a new file works, while normal saving does not. I can change the versions name but cannot check the milestone button and hitting the save button makes it darker while clicking but does not do anything.

Anyone else experiencing this issue?

[jgwS6UG3]

Is there anyway AutoDesk could provide some type of general statement on their plans for the M1 chips? I would assume and what they anticipate the performane to be like in regards to how it compares to Windows? I'm currently looking into building a Windows desktop as I've started to need to perform more intense modeling in Fusion, but I woud like to stick with Mac if possible. If they're going to release an update for the M1 (or future M series) that's going to rival the highend Windows desktops performance, I'd rather just wait and purchase an M series product. Obviously the chip will improve for the M2 iteration/etc, but some type of general comparison or epectations for an M1 optimized Fusion would be great as it seems like the chip will run Fusion very well considering all the benchmarks. I know these things take time, and there may be no way of estimating the performance like this at this time... but I thought it was worth an ask! Thanks.

[mail]

I'm having issue with the Auto-Router since upgrading to an M1 Macbook pro. The process hangs and never completes with force-quit being the only option out. Anyone else have a similar issue?