What Graphics Card (GPU) do I need for SOLIDWORKS?

Important: Nvidia Recently Retired the “Quadro” name for all new Professional GPU’s, Please refer to the below list or the Nvidia website here for a current list of all Nvidia Professional GPU’s, if an item is not on this list, it is a gaming GPU and thus will result in buggy and slower performance in Solidworks. If you are unsure please feel free to contact us.

Detailed Answer:

The GPU is what allows SOLIDWORKS to display and update the images of your model, this means it’ll affect the speed of rotating, zooming, panning etc of the model (it will not affect rebuild or open time however). SOLIDWORKS requires “Professional Graphics Cards”, more commonly known as Nvidia Quadro and AMD Pro GPU’s. The reason for this is that these GPU’s offer better performance than a gaming card of the same or better “spec” (see Puget Systems Testing here).

Since these GPU’s are also a partnership between the GPU manufacturers and SOLIDWORKS (as well as the rest of professional application), drivers for these cards are specifically developed to address bugs and improve performance. Without these fixes, you might see issues like:

• Everything Being Blue
• Whatever this is
• Feature Manager Disappearing
• Solidworks Crashing
• Flickering Feature Manager
• Laggy Performance

With this in mind, we’d recommend always buying a professional GPU, we have a preference towards Nvidia, as they seem to have a better track record in the Professional sphere of addressing bugs and performance issues but believe in recent years AMD have been improving and catching up.

So how do you pic a GPU? In general, we recommend the following:

1. Determine your existing GPU and what issues you are encountering graphically, please contact support if you are unsure if an issue is graphics related. This gives you 1 data point and you know anything below this will struggle in your applications.
2. Ask yourself are you going to be doing Visualize Renders, and if so, is the speed of those renders of key importance? If so, please ensure you get an RTX GPU, as these perform much better with rendering and Denoise.
3. Are you going to be opening large assemblies or extremely graphically intensive parts? If so it might be worth jumping to the mid to upper range of GPU’s. Please refer to Puget Systems testing, specifically the Lego Tower Assembly which test exactly for this.
4. Will you be using a 4k or another high-resolution screen? If so, again consider a mid to high end GPU model.

Tools to use to compare GPU models:

• Puget Systems Articles
• Solidworks Share Your Score Website
• Passmark GPU Benchmarks (Use this only to compare Professional GPU’s with each other)
• SpecAPC Solidworks Published Results

Important Note on Laptops:

Laptops will often have the same model GPU as you might see in desktops, however please note these are lower powered versions of the Desktop GPU, and thus you cannot draw comparisons between laptop and desktop parts. The rule of thumb is a GPU is generally one rung lower on the performance ladder, so if you’re considering a laptop RTX A5000, then on the desktop side its equivalent is the RTX A4000, however this is a very rough measure and I would suggest seeing the Passmark scores of the two and comparing them.

Date: 22/04/2022