SOLIDWORKS Visualize Introduces NVIDIA RTX Acceleration With up to 50 Percent Faster Performance

SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2020 SP0 is the first publicly available production release of SOLIDWORKS Visualize to take full advantage of NVIDIA RTX technology. Built on the NVIDIA Iray SDK, Visualize now leverages Tensor Cores and RT Cores within NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs to deliver the highest quality photo-realistic product images with near real-time ray tracing and AI denoising.

In our own performance benchmarks, we’ve seen an average of 30% speed improvements with Visualize 2020 over 2019 SP4 on the same RTX hardware! Some scenes show improvements of up to 50%! That’s a remarkable increase in render performance.

To put this in perspective, an HD-sized image that took five minutes to render will now complete in 2-3 minutes. While notable in its own right, it’s even more impressive when you consider a long animation, which consists of hundreds or thousands of images. A 10-second long animation that took a full day to complete, will now finish in around half a day.

The following scenes render 30 percent faster with full RTX acceleration in Visualize 2020:

Figure 1- NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 : HD-size : 1000 Passes : 60 seconds (~35% faster than 2019 sp04)

 

Figure 2 – NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 : HD-size : 1000 Passes : 2 minutes (~30% faster than 2019 sp04)

 

Turn on the real-time

With such fast performance on NVIDIA Quadro RTX hardware, we’ve exposed the ability to specify at which render pass the AI denoiser will turn on in SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2020.

Previously hardcoded to pass 10, you can now set this to anything you like, including just one pass!  Combine this with setting the Interactivity Acceleration Mode to “Steady,” and you can truly experience real-time ray tracing!

Check out the image of this storm trooper helmet after just a single rendering pass on an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000. Noise-free!

 

Figure 3 – NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 : 1 Render Pass at HD resolution Model courtesy of Bill Hamze, JL Audio, Inc.

 

Check out this Real-time Turntable of the same storm trooper helmet, also with the AI Denoiser set to turn on at just one pass.  Now that’s real-time raytracing!

 
Also coming to SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2019 sp05

Many of our users are using NVIDIA RTX graphics cards today.  While they already receive great performance in SOLIDWORKS Visualize, we wanted to squeeze every last bit of tech from these loaded NVIDIA Quadro RTX graphics cards. So we’re excited to announce that full NVIDIA RTX acceleration and support will also be part of Visualize 2019 sp05.  If you’re not ready to jump to Visualize 2020, but have RTX hardware, Visualize 2019 sp05 will get you your final quality renderings at up to 50 percent faster than today!

Driver Updates

*THIS NEXT PART IS VERY IMPORTANT*

To take advantage of this great new performance, SOLIDWORKS Visualize sp05 (and 2020) will require slightly newer drivers than those that were originally certified at the launch of SOLIDWORKS 2019 sp0.  Most graphics cards have already had newer drivers posted (for both 2019 and 2020) on our driver certification webpage.  But if you find your specific hardware has not yet had a newer certified driver posted, don’t fret.  It’s coming soon, and in this scenario we’re confident in recommending you can download the latest drivers directly from NVIDIA to work well with both SOLIDWORKS CAD and SOLIDWORKS Visualize.

A big thanks to the innovative teams over at NVIDIA for making this performance boost available to all our SOLIDWORKS Visualize customers!

 

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Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp. offers complete 3D software tools that let you create, simulate, publish, and manage your data. SolidWorks products are easy to learn and use, and work together to help you design products better, faster, and more cost-effectively. The SolidWorks focus on ease-of-use allows more engineers, designers and other technology professionals than ever before to take advantage of 3D in bringing their designs to life.
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