With many firms re-evaluating office space and working from home policies, we asked Adam Jull of IMSCAD about the role that virtual workstations can play

Meanwhile, Nvidia's mobile RTX series of professional graphics cards receive the most attention, with the chipmaker adding up to six new models. The latest additions include the RTX A5500, RTX A4500, RTX A3000 12GB, RTX A2000 8GB and RTX A500. The GA107 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip). It’s a double height board, with a max power consumption of 230W which it draws from the PSU via an 8-pin PCIe connector, but it’s still available in compact towers. Of course, the Nvidia RTX A6000 is complete overkill for most architects or product designers who simply want a capable GPU for real-time visualisation, GPU rendering or VR. And it’s here that the new Nvidia RTX A4000 and Nvidia RTX A5000 come into play.The name of this GPU-accelerated physically based renderer is a bit misleading as it works with many more applications than the CAD application of the same name. It can import models from Creo, Solid Edge, Catia and Inventor, as well as several neutral formats.

As we wait for AMD to deliver a Pro version of its ‘Big Navi’ Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs with hardware ray tracing, Nvidia’s biggest competitor in pro graphics is currently itself.Experience higher-quality products driven by power-efficient hardware and components selected for optimum operational performance, durability, and longevity. For comparison, we used the last two generations of ‘4000’ class Nvidia pro GPUs – the 8 GB ‘Turing’ Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 (from 2019) and the 8 GB ‘Pascal’ Nvidia Quadro P4000 (from 2017). Three to four years is quite a typical upgrade cycle in workstations, so the intention here is to give a good idea of the performance increase one might expect from an older machine. Equipping the RTX A4000 with 16 GB of memory is very significant. While we often see models / scenes that surpass 8 GB (the capacity of the previous generation Quadro RTX 4000) scenes that are 16 GB and above are certainly less common, and more the preserve of viz specialists than most architects or product designers who use standard materials and assets. Two, it supports Nvidia RTX vWS (virtual workstation software) so it can deliver multiple high-performance virtual workstation instances that enable remote users to share resources. In the Lenovo ThinkStation P620, for example, you could get a very high density of CAD/BIM users who only need high-end RTX performance from time to time.

Of course, the boundaries between real-time 3D and ray tracing continue to blur. In fact, out of the list above only Lumion and Twinmotion are yet to support RTX, although it should be coming to Twinmotion soon. The RTX A4500 takes the place of the RTX A4000, with 46 SMs — four more SMs than the latter. In addition, Nvidia has doubled the memory on the RTX A4500 from 8GB to 16GB. The RTX A4500 also shows higher memory bandwidth with a rating up to 512 GBps, 33% higher than the RTX A4000. That again indicates the use of 16Gbps GDDR6.

Graphics Processor

Which is the best CPU for design-centric workflows – from CAD and BIM to reality modelling and rendering One, it supports Nvidia NVLink, so GPU memory can be expanded to 48 GB by connecting two 24 GB GPUs together. Denoising is a post-processing technique based on machine learning that filters out noise from unfinished / noisy images and is the foundation for many RTX-accelerated applications. It means you can get better looking renders with significantly fewer rendering passes. All tests were carried out using the AMD Ryzen-based Scan 3XS GWP-ME A132R workstation at 4K (3,840 x 2,160) resolution using the latest 462.59 Nvidia driver. The GA104 chip offers 6,144 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 3,072 INT32 ALUs). With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formatsnow including AV1).

Another potential use case for high-density multi-GPU is workstation virtualisation using GPU passthrough, where each user gets a dedicated GPU. Again, this workflow looks well suited to the Lenovo ThinkStation P620, which can be configured with up to 64 CPU cores and 2TB of memory. The GA104 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip). Scale application performance even more with NVIDIA NVLink technology that lets you combine two RTX A5000 cards to double the effective GPU memory and performance in a single workstation chassis to 48 GB.

Mobile Graphics

Pro driver feature dramatically increases 3D performance by dynamically reducing viewport resolution Solidworks also features more realistic display styles for viewing models in real time. SolidWorks RealView, which is only supported by pro GPUs, adds realistic materials and supports environment reflections and floor shadows. Meanwhile, ambient occlusion adds more realistic shadows and helps bring out details. While most CAD applications won’t benefit from any GPU more powerful that the Nvidia Quadro P1000 or P2200, Solidworks 2021 is an exception. By using OpenGL 4.5, a more modern version of the popular graphics API, more algorithms can be pushed onto the GPU so there is a benefit to higher performance GPUs.