


In SolidWorks in particular, workstation GPUs are required for the RealView advanced shading feature, although whether or not that will matter to you will depend on your usage. Ideally, if money were no concern, you’d opt for the fastest workstation GPU possible, to receive both the best possible viewport performance, as well as enhanced reliability and stability – and not to mention the fastest rendering. That’s because both GPU vendors pour additional resources into their workstation drivers that ensure the best possible performance and reliability for a given product. As with many high-end CAD tools, SolidWorks’ support revolves entirely around workstation-specific GPUs – a la Radeon Pro or Quadro. Unfortunately, the above charts don’t paint a full picture, because they can’t relay the full pros and cons between gaming and workstation cards. Similarly, NVIDIA dominates the top-end of the charts. We do admit that we wish AMD’s cards performed better here somehow, the GeForce RTX 3060 entry-level gaming GPU outperforms AMD’s top-end Radeon Pro W6800, which isn’t really something we’d expect. SolidWorks’ viewport runs great on almost all of the GPUs featured here, with the higher-end cards naturally delivering the best performance. You can see a preview of all of the tested workloads below: We also test Blender with an in-house benchmark, with three of its primary view modes. Both AMD and NVIDIA happily promote SVP’s use, so we can feel confident in its scaling capabilities. OS and chipset driver are fully updated before testing.Īll testing was performed on our Ryzen 9 5950X workstation w/ DDR4-3200 8GBx4 Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro.ĪMD Radeon Pro Driver: Enterprise 21.Q2.1Īll product links in this table are affiliated, and support the website.įor the bulk of our viewport testing, we rely on SPEC’s SPECviewperf – and in particular, the latest 2020 v2 version. To get right to it, here’s our collection of tested GPUs, as well as the driver versions used: Graphics Cards Tested Unfortunately, our GPU lineup currently lacks any of the latest Ampere-based workstation GPUs from NVIDIA, but given the performance we’ll see from the Turing cards, it won’t be too challenging to surmise where NVIDIA’s latest (and greatest) cards would stand among the rest. In this article, we’re going to get up to speed with the latest performance from our collection of cards, including those new Radeon Pro W6600 and W6800 models. Since the last time we took a look at viewport performance in a wide-range of software ( this past February) we’ve seen the release of some new Radeon Pro cards from AMD, as well as a handful of driver updates from both AMD and NVIDIA.
