Graphics Cards for 2022

[Ramon PG]

The VWs 2022 Mid-level Profile recommends:

 

"Graphics Card:

3GB VRAM or more, macOS: Metal GPUFamily1 v4 or later, Windows: DirectX 11 compatible

 

Vision requires a dedicated OpenGL 4.1 compatible graphics card with 4GB of VRAM or more, preferably released in the past three years (e.g. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 series, AMD Radeon RX Vega series)."

 

I've being offered by vendors the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics card. Is this card compatible with VWs 2022?

 

 

[Art V]

In case you have not yet purchased the card, yes it is compatible in the sense that VW will run fine with it but... VW will not be able squeeze out all the performance that this card is capable of because that would require specific drivers that don't exist for VW (these drivers do exist for e.g. Solidworks, Autodesk software like Inventor, Maya etc.) Not sure if there are any Mac compatible drivers, probably for Windows only.

 

Getting a good GeForce RTX card will give you a much better performance for your money either because you get more performance for the same amount or you would be paying less for similar performance.

Do you need the card for a Windows machine or a Mac?

Edited April 16, 2022 by Art V

[o_arta_22]

I started a new job and the workstation is a dell optiplex 3090 sff i5 - I only do 2d CAD but 2022 seems very wierd - mostly  there’s latency between the cursor and line when drawing. The internal gpu is below spec - but dedicated gpu card upgrades are limited for this small machine. The GeForce 1030 is cheap and would appear compatible but would  it be good enough for basic cad work ? Any other suggestions or advice welcome 

[Art V]

How much RAM does your workstation have, it could also be a RAM memory issue and not a GPU issue, or it could be both.

 

Based on what I could find on your workstation model still being sold over here it has a 10th gen i5 (which is ok for 2D work), 8GB of RAM memory though you may have a version with more memory added when purchased, intel 630 GPU which will probably share memory with RAM.

 

You may also want to make sure you have enough free space left on your drive, which is probably a 256 GB SSD, depending on how many programs and files you have on it it could be that available space is getting too low for swap memory etc. for VW as well.

 

So you have two issues in my opinion:

1. Available RAM is probably too low anyway if you have 8GB, especially if you are running another program along Vectorworks it will go at the expense of available memory for VW and for the Intel 630 GPU causing the issue you have.

2. The GeForce GT-1030 is really low end from 5 years ago and has only 2GB Video RAM so I doubt it will make much of a difference for 2D work compared to the Intel 630 GPU if that has sufficient RAM available.

 

My suggestion would be to first check how much a RAM upgrade would cost, assuming it is possible to add more RAM to see if that makes a difference. Some systems are limited to 8GB max memory supported (I had one years ago that was already maxed out at 8GB so even when the CPU and GPU were still sufficient, RAM not being upgradable  was the bottleneck and I had to get a new machine anyway).

If it improves responsiveness of Vectorworks but not enough then you could still consider getting a GeForce GT-1030 though I would rather check if there is not a better low-profice GPU card available.

 

That being said, with VW2023 when that comes out you will probably run into this issue again so you may want to consider getting a new workstation instead if that is financially speaking an option. The cost of additional RAM and a GPU is probably 30-40% of a new system if the price over here is an indication so it may not be the best investment compared to getting a new(er) workstation if the current one with hardware upgrades may get you perhaps just one year of additional usability.

 

 

[o_arta_22]

Thanks - really helpful - it’s a recent 3090sff with an i5 chip - not sure about hd type but it’s brand new . It’s says it has 1x 8gb ram only but has two slots and can go up to 64 max. So could look at 2x 16gb ram. 

[Art V]

The computer may be recent but unfortunately that does not mean the internals are also recent. The i5 model I saw listed locally has a 10th gen Intel processor (i.e. From 2019/2020) so it is not that recent. It isn't a bad processor though and should suffice for 2D work.

 

If it can go to 64 max, then for 2D 16 GB might be sufficient though someone from Vectorworks has probably better info on this to comment whether 16GB would be enough for you or that 32 GB would be preferable. If you want to go for 32GB then please do check if there are better low profile alternatives available than the GT 1030 just in case.