Dassault Systèmes and AMD have worked together to provide a better solution for CAD modelers and designers with the ATI FireGL line of workstation graphics accelerators.
Recent years have seen dramatic increases in the size of typical models the mechanical designer is tasked to create. This push has come from two sources. First, improvements in manufacturing technology have allowed products to be made with much smaller mechanical tolerances. Second, design aesthetics have advanced to a point where ergonomics and style have become a more important part of the overall product design.
At the same time that models have grown larger, there is also a push for more realism when reviewing these more complex datasets. With the increased focus on usability, lights and shadows, the texture of surfaces get more attention than ever before. No longer is it sufficient to just model a simply shaded object. The product needs to be examined in a variety of lighting conditions.
The combination of these two trends has created an unprecedented demand on the performance of workstation graphics accelerators, which led Dassault Systèmes to implement Vertex Buffer Objects (VBO) in their OpenGL engine and AMD to optimize their ATI FireGL™ OpenGL driver to fit all the CATIA V5 requirements.
This allows the application to transfer much of the overhead required to generate a model’s geometry to the graphics processing unit (GPU) on the ATI FireGL graphics accelerator.
The model’s entire geometry is now stored on the graphics card’s memory and can be rendered at the maximum speed. With its industry-leading memory configurations featuring up to 2 GB, the ATI FireGL line can therefore accommodate larger models than ever before. Even the 32-bit version of the software will see advantages in the size of model that can be visualized. The ATI FireGL technology has also improved the memory transfers from the CPU to the GPU to better modify any data at any time. Together, AMD and Dassault Systèmes are providing a better solution for the more realistic modeling of larger datasets needed by today’s mechanical designers
For more information: http://ati.amd.com/FireGL
