Performance benchmarks are great, but speed alone is becoming more of a commodity in graphics cards. This video looks at three ways that AMD FirePro graphics benefit SolidWorks users above and beyond the basic performance specs:
Congratulations to Andrew Kramar, winner of the COE TOP GUN XXV competition and the grand prize of an AMD FirePro V7900 card.
TOP GUN is a competition for the “Best of the Best” CATIA engineers and designers to test their skills at developing the most accurate and correctly-structured three dimensional model, in the least amount of time.
This year the competition was to model a piece of the rotor for a helicopter, based on 3 or 4 drawings. Andrew accurately completed the task in just 21:16 minutes.
From Andrew: “For some reason I had a can of Mountain Dew just before the competition and since I don’t even drink coffee regularly, the caffeine in that thing was giving me the jitters like you wouldn’t believe. Who knows, maybe it helped because when I was all finished I starting thinking I must have missed something because everyone else was still sitting down! So I reviewed the drawing again for a second and I actually caught one radius that I had missed. After that I figured I would kill my time if I started double checking every dimension, so I decided to just go for it and “click the red box” hoping there weren’t any other mistakes. I had no idea whether or not I won or not until just yesterday. Dave from Inceptra did tell me that I had the fastest time, but they had not checked the accuracy yet. I’m pretty excited to get the shiny new graphics card. I’m looking forward to building a new system around it with a bit more capital than I would have had otherwise!
Thanks to all the sponsors: Dell, AMD, and Inceptra!”
The AMD FirePro team sent some pix from their booth at Siemens PLM World 2012. In addition to the always cool Eyefinity shots, I am also wanting one of those FirePro mugs!
The FireProGraphics website has been updated to include information specific to Creo 2.0 and the unique productivity gains enabled through the lastest generation of FirePro graphics.
The site brings together many of the benchmarks, white papers and videos I’ve written about previously and explains how AMD worked with PTC to not only increase performance 100s of fold, but also to increase accuracy and reliability.
If you are looking for a single resource that describes the real strengths of the VX900 FirePro graphics line for CAD or M&E, this site is worth a look. In addition to Creo Parametric 2.0, their is also a dedicated section for SolidWorks.
Pictures from the AMD booth at COE 2012 Annual PLM Conference & TechniFair.
Dell Latitude T3500 Workstation with AMD FirePro V7900 running CATIA V6
Dell M6600 mobile workstation with 3DVIA Composer running Eyefinity on FirePro Mobility card
AMD FirePro Booth
This video compares PTC Creo Parametric 2.0 to Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5 for 3D transparency rendering on an AMD FirePro V7900. AMD and PTC developed a new hardware-accelerated transparency feature called Order Independent Transparency (OIT) (See post on ultra-fast GPU-accelerated 3D transparency mode for Creo Parametric 2.0). With the new OIT users can experience up to 900% faster performance in 3D transparency rendering with AMD FirePro professional graphics cards. Check out the video to see the first public example of this. This is impressive.
About OIT in Creo 2.0
If you are interested in the technology behind OIT in Creo 2.0, check out this white paper “Order Independent Transparency (OIT) in PTC Creo Parametric 2.0”.
AMD and PTC developed an ultra-fast GPU-accelerated (900%) 3D transparency rendering mode in PTC Creo Parametric 2.0 along with a 4X increase in shaded 3D frame rates and interactivity using VBO on AMD FirePro professional graphics cards. (See press release).
PTC Creo Parametric 2.0 users benefit by using FirePro Graphics and the certified drivers in several ways:
Download AMD + PTC Innovation in 3D CAD workflows pdf
The below video with Antoine Reymond, Senior Strategic Alliances Manager in AMD's Professional Graphics group, describes the AMD/PTC partnership and the value it provides to joint customer.
This video of Jon Clark, Sr. Applications Engineer with AMD, gives a high-level overview of AMD FirePro Eyefinity Technology. It starts by highlighting the FirePro V3900, V4900, V5900, and V7900. At about 1:15 sec in there is a great demo of a single V7900 using Eyefinity to drive three 24” displays running PTC’s Windchill, Pro/Engineer, and Creo.
Tom’s Hardware has a particularly interesting review of AMD’s new entry level ($110) discrete, professional GPU - the AMD FirePro V3900. Tom’s ran a suite of benchmarks and the FirePro V3900 completely dominated Nvidia’s Quadro 400 and beat out the Quadro 600 in most scenario, often by a great margin - particularly in CATIA, Lightwave, Maya, and SolidWorks, and Siemens NX
Notably, the V3900 draws more power in idle and under load than its competitors, but Tom’s still recommend the FirePro V3900.
“The FirePro V3900 is a fitting successor for the V3800. Priced at $110, we consider it to be a good value in the entry-level workstation graphics card space. As long as you’re primarily looking at mostly static CAD images, this card is a good alternative to the low-end Quadro cards, both with respect to price and performance.”
Tom’s also did a quick comparison to comparable chips on consumer cards like the Radeon HD 6570 or Geforce GT 430 and saw massive performance dips due to consumer grade drivers. Conclusion: “For folks whose jobs depend on good performance and validation in money-making applications, paying the extra money (for the professional card and driver) is probably justified.”
Khronos is hosting a series of COLLADA Community Meet Ups to get end user input and feedback to help launch OpenCOLLADA. COLLADA is a non-proprietary file format for the exchange of digital assess and FX. The goal of the new OpenCOLLADA is to create rock-solid import/export capability across DCC (e.g. 3ds Max, Maya Blender) and CAD apps. The CAD industry is also exploring COLLADA 1.5 and Khronos is pushing forward to make COLLADA an ISO standard.
The first COLLADA Meetup is being held concurrently to GDC in San Francisco on March 7th. Sign-up to attend if you want to have a voice in COLLADA’s future. Khronos is seeking input from the 3D community, from individuals to companies.
More info here:
https://collada.org/mediawiki/index.php/Open_Letter_March_2012.
Note: Registration is only used to validate postings. It will not used for marketing or tracking in any way.
Register to: