Will a AMD Radeon™graphic card in a computer be enough for SolidWorks software?
Will a AMD Radeon™graphic card in a computer be enough for SolidWorks software?
According to the SW hardware recommendations it is not certified. Will it work - maybe / maybe not. It will depend on the type of work being done in SW. Surfacing and complex shapes could be a problem. Rendering will not work great.
Some people use the Radeon and other non-approved cards but using a certified card (Firepro-series or Nvidia Quadro) will present less problems.
Radeon Card is gaming card, NOT certified to run SOLIDWORKS:
Here are the lists of graphic cards that are certified to run SOLIWORKS Graphics Card Drivers | SOLIDWORKS
There are many graphics card that are not on the list of certified cards list that work great with SolidWorks. SolidWorks has to make a judgment call on what cards they are going to certify. Of course a FirePro card will work better than a Radeon, but it is much more expensive. SolidWorks wants their software to run as good as possible, so they are going to choose to certify the best cards.
Mainly what you have to look out for is a card that does not support OpenGL. Then you need to make sure that you use a driver provided by the card vendor and not the default Microsoft driver. Microsoft created DirectX, so they purposefully do not include the OpenGL driver in the default driver provided with Windows.
There might be some graphics artifacts here and there from using a gaming card instead of a Professional card. But, lets be real, a graphics card is displaying images on the screen. So, as long as it can understand the information it can process it and display it. That is why you need OpenGL support. Most gaming cards do great work with OpenGL since there are many games built using OpenGL.
Just remember, If you have an issue with SolidWorks and try to get support, they might not be able to help because you don't have a supported card.
I am currently trying to build a workstation to run Solidworks for a friend.
i have a few options, i need to know if any of these card would work with SOLIDWORKS
"If non-NVIDIA graphics cards are installed, SOLIDWORKS Visualize defaults to the central processing unit (CPU) and does use these cards for GPU-acceleration"
If you're building a work station just get a certified card so you can be reasonably sure it will work. Ingvar Magnusson posted a link where you can check.
Maybe outside the computer will give better results