One of the least talked about major enhancement in the SOLDIWORKS 2019 is the new graphics engine based on OpenGL 4.5. It makes new and old video cards (up to 6 year old) fly compared to SW 2018 performance!

We wanted to put this new graphics engine to test, so ​ and I used 3 simple tests, readily available to everyone to measure the improvements, as much as we could.

If you are curious why we are so excited about the potential of time savings for users of large assemblies and complex parts, read our story in the engineering.com:

20 to 30 Times Faster Graphics Response with SOLIDWORKS 2019’s New Graphics Engine > ENGINEERING.com

The tests protocols are described in details in the article. Some of the results were captured by manually spinning the viewport as fast as we could and visually recording the FPS numbers. We are sure, such tests could be improved with macros, but we did not have time for that.

I am curious if you could reproduce our results. Do you see the same huge improvement in graphics performance in SOLIDWORKS 2019?

If you repeat our tests, please follow the same tests protocols we used. Also, please list the video card you used and the results you measured.

Many thanks to ​, ​, ​ and Mark Johnson from SOLIDWORKS, ​ from AMD and ​ from NVIDIA for priceless the technical insight and feedback offered during testing.