I have seen so many posts about which video card to get but I never see any technical specifications for what the video card needs to have.
I keep hearing about 2D and 3D cards as well. I want to know the difference (in terms of hardware/specifications) between the two.
I don't care about what brands or model, just tech specs.
Can someone please provide me with these? It is much appreciated. Cheers
The reason you don't see people talking about technical specifications for video requirements is that the hardware specifications cover performance while the drivers usually cover which SolidWorks display faetures are supported.
There are $150 dollar cards that fully support SolidWorks' display features, but the framerate will start dropping when the display data becomes too large for the memory buffers and GPU cores to handle efficiently. There's also a ceiling to video card performance impact since most of SolidWorks' computational operations are CPU dependent and SolidWorks doesn't leverage technologies like SLI. So a 2000 dollar video card won't give you an appreciable performance improvement over a 500 dollar card.
Now if you want to know what video cards and in particular what GPU's perform the best, you should look at the numerous benchmarks for display resolution and framerates posted by manufacturers. Charles Culp put together a pretty good matrix comparrison of video cards that you can review if you want to hone your selection based on Bus, memory, gpu version and the like. https://forum.solidworks.com/thread/64436
In terms of requirements, what's most important isn't the hardware, it's the drivers. In general, SolidWorks requires a video card with a full OpenGL installable client driver. SolidWorks takes advantage of some high-level functionality on the GPU for realview and that's implemented either through OpenCL or the CUDA architecture (I'm not sure which).
The reason you see people referencing brands and models of video cards instead of technical specs is that some display features in SolidWorks won't turn on unless the card and driver is from their database of certified cards. That's why, despite being fully supported for SolidWorks 2011 and later, my nVidia Quadro 600 doesn't display realview in SolidWorks 2009.
Now if you don't care about realview, you'll find plenty of annecdotal evidence that with a few exceptions, just about any video card will work to some extent. The Geforce GTX650 (I think that's the designation) appears to be perfectly suitable for everything except realview and is one of the goto favorites for people installing SolidWorks on a Mac via Bootcamp.
The exceptions include the nVidia NVS and ATI Radeon. These lines don't have strong OpenGL implementations. The NVS is a 2D card, which means that it supports hardware acceleration to render Windows forms, vector paint, Flash and streaming video but doesn't have the parallel processing or drivers or OpenGL implementation needed for 3D display transforms. The Radeon isn't supported because it's drivers are crud and it creates display artifacts and crashes when you have multiple accelerated windows open.
In cases where the video acceleration is completely inadequate or unstable, SolidWorks may disable hardware acceleration and switch to a software emulation mode of OpenGL. In this mode, the graphics are processed by the CPU and while it's more stable than a glitchy video card, it's laggy.