Reality capture is a boom business for the building industry. With roughly 5 million existing commercial buildings in the United States alone, it’s easy to understand why. Laser-scanner-based reality capture is the dominant methodology used today to accurately capture the 3D state of an existing building. However, the typical laser-scan-based point cloud is in the hundreds of millions of 3D points, sometimes even going into the billions of points. With this additional data overhead on top of an already dense Building Information Model, it’s important to optimize your workstation hardware to deliver a productive user experience.

Topics: Workstations, Autodesk, RAM, Hardware, Graphics Card, Hard Drive, Processors, Revit, SSD Drive, GPU, Memory, Graphics Cards, Connectivity, Backup System, Video Cards, CAD

Last week, I talked about why Intel's latest generations of graphics-enabled CPUs might make CAD professionals think twice about paying extra dollars for a discrete graphics card on their next workstations.

Topics: Dell Business Workstation, Workstations, Hardware, Graphics Card, GPU, Graphics Cards, AMD, Intel, Dell Workstations, CAD

Intel had been promising that its latest generations of graphics-enabled CPUs would make CAD professionals think twice about paying extra dollars for a discrete graphics card on their next workstations. And it appears those promises are holding true … not in dramatic fashion, but valid nonetheless.

Topics: Dell Business Workstation, Workstations, Hardware, Graphics Card, GPU, Graphics Cards, AMD, Intel, Dell Workstations, CAD

Order Independent Transparency (OIT) in computer graphics programming terminology denotes any technique that can correctly render overlapping semi-transparent objects without having to sort them before they are being rendered. Rendering semi-transparent objects has always been a problem because the blending operation is order dependent: when a semi-transparent fragment is rendered, the underlying color (i.e. the background) is crucial for the final color to be correct.

Topics: Workstations, Hardware, Graphics Card, GPU, Graphics Cards, AMD, Creo Parametric, CAD

Topics: Workstations, Hardware, Graphics Card, AutoCAD, Processors, GPU, 3D, Graphics Cards, CAD

Topics: Dell Business Workstation, Workstations, Hardware, Graphics Card, Multi-Threading, Processors, Graphics Cards, Sustainability, Intel, Dell Workstations, CAD

Topics: Dell Business Workstation, Workstations, RAM, Hardware, Graphics Card, Hard Drive, AutoCAD, Processors, GPU, Memory, Graphics Cards, AMD, Video Cards, Operating System, Dell Workstations, Windows, CAD

Topics: Workstations, Autodesk, RAM, Hardware, Graphics Card, Hard Drive, 32-Bit, AutoCAD, Processors, Operating Systems, GPU, Memory, Graphics Cards, Upgrade, Video Cards, Operating System, 64-Bit, Windows

BIMx is GRAPHISOFT’s solution to explore, present, communicate and share design. BIMx enables architects and their clients to walk through professionally rendered 3D models with an easy-to-use navigation interface.

Topics: ArchiCAD, Hardware, Graphics Card, Building Information Modeling, Graphics Cards, Mobile Workstations, Video Cards

Topics: Workstations, Processors, GPU, Graphics Cards, AMD