Assemblies Without Experiencing Delays

When working with large assemblies in SOLIDWORKS, dynamic view manipulation is essential for the user. Even until 2018, this wasn’t too impressive in Solidworks because for a long time, the CPU had been a limiting factor when it comes to graphics performance(even though high end recommended graphics cards installed). Over the years, SOLIDWORKS has worked hard to optimize view manipulation. For instance, large assembly mode was introduced but it will disable model edges, shadows, real view, and more. The level of detail could be set to fast, which removes small components during view changes. These optimizations make view manipulation fast but come at the expense of a visual appeal. When better visual quality is desired, large assembly mode can be disabled but graphics performance is sacrificed.

Solidworks 2019 is a game changer as the development team has worked hard for last few years just on development of new codes for graphics, that can take advantage of the latest graphics card technology OpenGL4.5 for GPU processing of a graphical display. Now with Solidworks 2019, users can manipulate large assemblies without experiencing delays or compromising visual quality. Large assembly mode can be turned off and still lightning fast graphics as compared to the previous versions, without sacrificing on any details as mentioned.

Upon rigorous testing with certified NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards by Solidworks team along with graphics cards provider team, a conclusion was made that this new functionality tends to increase graphics performance by around 25%.

Enable the Performance Pipeline

In the 2019 version, unlocking the performance in your professional video card is done by going to Tools> Options> System Options> Performance and checking the box called “Enable performance pipeline” Restart the program after that.

Note:

• For NVIDIA, the Kepler, Maxwell and Pascal lines support this functionality. Examples include: NVIDIA Quadro K4000, M4000 and P4000.
• For AMD, all video cards build on Graphics Core Next (GCN) micro-architecture to support the new functionality. That means any card newer than six years old, in the Firepro W and Wx series, would be faster. Of course, the newest cards from the Radeon Pro line will fully support the new graphics engine in SOLIDWORKS.

Please keep in mind that these recommendations are for SOLIDWORKS 2019 with “Enhanced graphics performance” enabled, and that mode is still in beta. At some point it will be released as a full feature, presumably, and may eventually even be the default or only option – but right now, it should be used carefully for evaluation or testing and avoided for critical work.

Ahmad Muhammad
Applications Engineer
Central Innovation, Perth

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