Following up on our previous article about SOLIDWORKS 2018 GPU performance, we have been provided with an extremely complex assembly that finally shows some performance difference between low- and high-end video cards within the same family. Armed with this 4372 part, 40.9 million triangle model we ran through testing on multiple Quadro and Radeon Pro graphics cards to see how they handle such a monstrously large project.
Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve is known for how well it utilizes multiple GPUs to improve performance, but is this still true with cards like the new NVIDIA Titan V? And do you really need a Xeon or Dual Xeon setup to get the best performance possible?
Despite how popular SOLIDWORKS is, there is a lot of outdated and simply inaccurate information on the web regarding what video card you should use. For this article I tested multiple graphics cards from the Quadro, GeForce, and Radeon Pro families at both 1080p and 4K resolutions – and quickly found that either things are now a lot simpler than in my past experience, or else something is no longer up to snuff regarding how we have tested SOLIDWORKS GPU performance in the past.
If your workflow depends on having 10-bit color support on your primary display, using a workstation graphics card is typically the only way to do so since most consumer cards do not support displaying 10-bit color. But do you really need a Quadro P6000 or can you use a much less expensive card like the Quadro P4000 or Radeon Pro WX 9100 without sacrificing very much performance?
The NVIDIA Titan V has many the features that are not useful in DaVinci Resolve, but it’s raw power allows it to give the highest single GPU playback performance of any GPU we have every tested.
The NVIDIA Titan V is an interesting and powerful card with a mix of features that should improve performance and features that are completely unused by Premiere Pro. The raw power of this card makes it the fastest GPU we’ve testing for Exporting, but it unfortunately is not quite as impressive when it comes to Live Playback performance.
Pix4D is an advanced photogrammetry application, suited to wide range of uses, with a focus on handling images captured by drone cameras. Processing of those images into point clouds and 3D meshes / textures utilizes the video card (GPU) in a workstation, but how much impact do different cards make on overall performance?
Iray is a GPU-based rendering engine that is able to utilize multiple video cards to achieve maximum performance. In this article we will be testing to see how well Iray is able to use both different models of video cards as well as multiple physical cards in parallel.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4GB is a very interesting card in that it really isn’t that much faster than the cards already available, but it has a dramatically lower power draw – 80W less than the GTX 780 or GTX 780Ti.
Recently, a question came up in one of our department meetings: are video cards getting more or less reliable? There are times when it feels like video cards are failing left and right and we start to pine for the “good old days”. Then, we remember how hot Fermi cards used to run. To get a more accurate answer this question, we decided to examine our GPU failure logs and break down the numbers by generation.
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