Every year the automotive industry releases new vehicles and concept cars, captivating car enthusiasts worldwide. Engineering and design teams cross-pollinate and collaborate to deliver amazing design renderings, spurring consumer demand when a given model makes its way into production. It takes far more than pencil and paper to bring a concept to a prototype and then transition to mass production. Car manufacturers, such as Toyota and Volkswagen, utilize cutting-edge software applications, such as Autodesk VRED.
Autodesk VRED is a 3D and VR capable product visualization and virtual prototyping software tool, used by engineers and designers throughout the automotive industry. Autodesk VRED software enables designers to create product presentations, design reviews, and virtual prototypes using interactive ray tracing and analytic render modes. Working with Autodesk VRED requires extremely powerful NVIDIA Quadro RTX hardware and RTX technology enabled software tools like NVIDIA OptiX. VRED Raytracer, built on NVIDIA’s platform, delivered the raw graphics performance and software sophistication required to realize Autodesk’s ambitious product goals for VRED.Before NVIDIA Quadro RTX, Autodesk VRED required several CPU servers to do a single render, resulting in a slow and expensive process that held back exploration of multiple design concepts. At SIGGRAPH 2019 everything changed when Autodesk VRED was unleashed by a 4U RTX Server with 10x NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs – a combination capable of realizing photorealistic physically based real-time ray traced automotive rendering at 4K resolution. Autodesk’s VRED Product Manager was amazed to see what formerly required a rack full of CPU servers reduced to a single GPU-enabled system.
To illustrate the performance enhancements NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs provide, Autodesk compared the performance of the previous CPU-based servers to the new NVIDIA RTX server. The baseline was a dual CPU workstation with 40 cores and 80 threads, representing systems commonly used by the VRED community. When a single NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 GPU was added its dedicated RT Cores optimized for real-time ray tracing improved performance by 2.5x. Adding a second GPU doubled performance, while a third delivered 2.85 times the performance of a single GPU, or 6.6x the performance of a dual CPU system.
Autodesk’s VRED 2021 software combined with NVIDIA Quadro RTX Server has significantly changed the automotive design landscape, and allowed designers to realize previously unachievable creative scope and vision. Improved performance and costs associated with NVIDIA Quadro RTX hardware now represent the gold standard for virtual prototyping software.
To learn more about NVIDIA Quadro RTX and the synergies realized by Autodesk VRED Raytracer watch the presentation by Michael Nikelsky, Autodesk : GTC 2020: Bringing the Autodesk VRED Raytracer to the GPU. Make sure you also visit Autodesk’s site to learn more about Autodesk VRED’s RTX accelerated software enhancements.
