NVIDIA and AMD became the two main survivors of an industry shakeout.Īs the market consolidated, GPU vendors started adding end-user programmability. When the industry standardized on Windows as the de facto operating system, hardware companies were free to focus on performance. Each graphics card required a unique software driver for each software product it worked with.

In the days of the PC, there were a wide variety of graphics cards, some of which only worked in monochrome. The GPU was originally designed to provide a performance boost for technical software. “Now we have an iterative approach, where one question leads to another,” notes Hindsbo.

The switch is breaking down the traditional analysis workflow of one model analysis at a time. PTC, for example, sells a version of Discovery Live and has also adapted parts of its existing CAE portfolio to take advantage of GPU acceleration. Today various simulation and analysis products from several vendors support the use of GPU technology. “But they dig in and see it has actually solved the problem they are used to waiting minutes or more for.”Īnsys Discovery Live was a breakthrough for the industry when it first shipped in 2017. “Whenever customers experience a real-time simulation for the first time they scarcely believe it is real,” adds Greg Brown, product management fellow at PTC. “It allowed a real-time paradigm” for simulation as part of the initial design exploration. “We got a speed boost of up to 1000x on our algorithms,” when they integrated GPU support into the Ansys Discovery Live prototype. “Five years ago we were noticing Moore’s law was declining on CPUs but accelerating on GPUs,” says Mark Hindsbo, vice president and general manager for the Design Business Unit at Ansys. Finally, it wrote new code to capitalize on the observation that graphics processing unit (GPU)-based computation was increasing in speed at a much faster rate than CPU computation. Next, it borrowed heavily from its portfolio finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solutions. The first was SpaceClaim, a direct editing CAD tool used for faster 3D modeling. When Ansys developed Discovery Live for real-time early design exploration, it brought together three separate technologies.

Fusion 360 gpu rendering