NVIDIA And Dassault Systèmes Tease ‘RTX On’ Features Coming To SolidWorks

At the ongoing SOLIDWORKS World 2019, NVIDIA, along with a number of partners, rolled out a slew of Quadro RTX workstations. As you might expect, given the location, these workstations are perfectly suited for SolidWorks use, allowing users to edit inside of a fluid viewport in SW, and then render or animate in SW Visualize.

NVIDIA and Dassault jointly showed off a tech demo at SOLIDWORKS World to give us a taste of what’s to come (likely in the 2020 versions). Using the RT cores, renderings in SolidWorks Visualize can deliver a suitable result up to five-times quicker, while the Tensor cores will be used for AI-accelerated denoising. These features could be game-changing for many, so the only unfortunate thing about this is the fact that we must wait for the updated tools to become production-ready!

In order to take advantage of RealView in SolidWorks, a Radeon Pro or Quadro card is required. When all requirements are met, the viewport will offer much more realistic lighting, shading, and reflections. It in effect gives a bit of life to the scene, allowing users to edit in really high detail before moving onto the production render (such as in SW Visualize). When the RTX features get here, user workflows will only improve. The quicker you get your result, the quicker you can move onto the next step (or project), after all.

At the show, NVIDIA has focused a lot of its attention on VR use in SolidWorks. That includes using VR with eDrawings Pro 2019, or using Visualize Pro to export to NVIDIA’s Holodeck for photorealistic, multi-user collaboration. There are many possibilities; you’re certainly not going to be locked into a specific workflow.

In its accompanying blog post, NVIDIA says that BOXX, Dell, HP, and Lenovo are all at SOLIDWORKS World to show off their latest rendering powerhouses, so you won’t have to look far to find a powerful build suitable for serious design workloads – including those to come.