jareDrake13 :
Hi, I am a student in an engineering class, and I am thinking of getting a student edition of Solidworks. Now I know that my computer will handle it better than the school's, those computer have core 2 duos, 3 gb of RAM. But I have a gtx 760. Is this going to be utilized by solidworks in a gpu acceleration sort of way?
jareDrake13,
Solidworks is an interesting program from the hardware point of view as they produce their own optimized drivers that can run very high-128X anti-aliasing. They are quite particular that the GPU have certain capabilities as can be seen by their recommended / certified site:
http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/videocardtesting.html
> Where you can see that all the NVIDIA cards are Quadros, there are no GTX listings. As 3D programs become more demanding, and programs that rely on viewports, the more the software makers insist on workstation cards. The key to graphics performance in Solidworks are the drivers. If you are running 3ds Max on anything except a Firepro or Quadro, Autodesk will point at fairly early opportunities to blame problems on the GPU, in effect, support is limited if the GPU is not using the correct drivers. In a very good review of workstation cards on this site:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-workstation-graphics-card,3493-9.html
"SolidWorks 2013 is limited to workstation-class graphics cards. Unfortunately, the drivers we're using won't install on gaming boards, so we cannot include them. Additionally, if the software is run with non-certified drivers, there's supposed to be a quantifiable performance hit. The only exception is the version used by SPECapc 2013, which supposedly allows full use of SolidWorks 2013 whether the driver you're running is certified or not. We didn't bother testing, but rather used the certified drivers for this story. "
In Maya, which uses viewports, a $150 AMD Firepro V3900 is faster than a $1,000 GTX Titan:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-workstation-graphics-card,3493-8.html
>and so on. I tried a GTX 285 and it was a disaster in Solidworks and I never had a useable rendering - artifacts, bizarre shadows and etc., plus the loss of the very high anti-aliasing made it nearly impossible to dimension to certain curved and circles.
The best course would be to try your current card with Solidworks and see the results. For learning purposes in which the models are not too complex, and the time is not money, it might work out well enough. The fact that the school systems have such minimal specifications is also a clue to the real demands. If there are crashes, quality problems or it's too slow, consider changing to a Quadro or Firepro. You didn't ask for recommendations, but only for conversation I'd suggest that if you have a budget of $450 or so, you might consider a new Quadro K2200 (4GB) or used Firepro W7000 (4GB). A used Quadro K4000 or W5000 would be useful as well.
Cheers,
BambiBoom
HP z420 (2014) > Xeon E5-1620 quad core @ 3.6 / 3.8GHz > 24GB DDR3 ECC 1600 RAM > Quadro 4000 (2GB)> Samsung 840 SSD 250GB /Western Digital Black WD1003FZEX 1TB> M-Audio 192 sound card > AE3000 USB WiFi > HP 2711X, 27" 1920 X 1080 > Windows 7 Ultimate 64 >[Passmark system rating = 3923, CPU= 9223/ 2D= 839 / 3D=2048]
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2D, 3D CAD, Image Processing, Rendering, Text > Architecture, industrial design, graphic design, written projects
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