As CAD software becomes more and more powerful and resulting models become more complex and large in size, it requires more and more horsepower under the hood of engineering workstations to run effectively. Enter NVIDIA, the somewhat undisputed leader in the 3D graphic cards market.
You could find NVIDIA cards working quietly behind the scenes everywhere in the Partner Pavilion at this year’s SolidWorks World, being that its cards are the most popular among SolidWorks users with approximately 80% of the SolidWorks market.
The most popular of which is the Quadro Pro K2000 cards that sell for only about $400, a small price to pay for significantly increased productivity, right? Need even more power? Upgrade to the company’s K6000 for $4,500, which offers a whopping 12 GB of frame buffer memory and can make even the largest assemblies and photorealistic renderings and animations move in real time.
NVIDIA’s Quadro 6000 is the first professional-class GPU to integrate high performance computing capabilities with advanced visualization techniques, transforming modern workflows.
Quadro 6000被吹捧以比其前身更快地提供5倍的性能，每秒可以提供13亿个三角形，破坏了先前的3D图形限制。对于CFD等应用程序的严重数据处理，这些卡的性能增长为8倍。尽管NVIDIA的垂直营销总经理安德鲁·克雷斯西（Andrew Cresci）看到这些高端卡片的工作真是令人印象深刻，但它为最后的冠军节省了最好的。
NVIDIA takes on shared, virtual computing
仅仅是成为设计世界的3D图形加速度的领导者，Nvidia都注重利用其用于共享计算的技术。在我在公司的简报中，Cresci在公司的虚拟计算设备（VCA）上给了我一个偷偷摸摸的高峰。The appliance can be located anywhere–in a data center or a company’s centralized IT center–and can fed graphics to nearly any computing device, including iPads, mobile devices, low-end PCs, etc. It works by compressing graphics from the centralized server-like hub from any distance with no discernible lag, at least that I saw during my demo.
作为一个编辑,我讨厌把无意义的words, like “cool,” but indeed it was cool. I was able to manipulate a rather large SolidWorks assembly running on a PC in the NVIDIA booth that was being fed from the company’s headquarters in San Clara, 400 miles away from where we were. You can pretty quickly see the advantage of VCA for engineers and designers. Imagine being able to tap the computing power of a large server running existing software from your iPad or low-end PC.
由于公司继续尝试从现有资源（软件和硬件）中挤出更多价值，因此很难看不到VCA为产品开发人员提供的真正生产力优势。不便宜；$ 25K+浮动许可证，但肯定是一项技术产品，我们将来会关注。在Nvidia上自己检查一下地点。
提交以下：3D CAD World
