SolidWorks: Radeon Pro W6800 and Vulkan Viewport

[Certified]

Is anyone else using the new AMD Radeon Pro W6800 yet on SolidWorks 2021? It has 32GB of GPU memory for that hungry graphics "performance" pipeline! I've been running it for a few months now. One of these days I will learn my lesson and stop living on the bleeding edge. It had a pretty bad gpu memory leak affecting solidworks in the 21.Q1 driver that seems to have gotten much better on the latest 21.Q3 driver. Realview works even though Solidworks still does not have the Radeon Pro W6600 or W6800 listed on the certification page, but https://www.amd.com/system/files/docume ... -W6000.pdf and https://develop3d.com/visualisation/sol ... y-tracing/ both seem to point at certification incoming in an uncertain timeline.

Even more interesting, those links also mentioned a new Vulkan based viewport being worked on at Solidworks to replace the current OpenGL one. That strikes me as pretty big news and worth discussion. They where apparently using a preproduction W6800 to demo the project romulan viewport in the Develop3d article above. We again have no timeline to go on, but I did notice a suspiciously named sldvkrsu.dll in my 2022 PR install that wasn't in my 2021. Anyone want to join me in idle speculation?

[aepoc]

I'm running a similar setup and have not been able to get solidworks to use GPU when rendering calculation results... running driver v 21.Q3. tried to use a W5500 driver (SW certified) but it automatically updated to the most current W6800 version. I can't even run through a simple static studyin less than 3 days with no GPU integration... So frustrating that after all the trouble to get a new GPU, I can't even use it! I'm hoping that someone out there knows how to get solidworks to utilize my W6800... would rather not just wait until they decide to release 2022 (no guarantee it will be supported then either)

anyway, Please/Thank you!

[Certified]

I unfortunately don't have access to simulation installed anywhere, so can't speak on it. Just in case it is still helpful, I've attached the Radeon and Solidworks graphics settings I've found work best for me in vanilla Solidworks. The big ones in Solidworks where turning draft quality ambient occlusion off and draft quality HLR/HLV on. Optimize for thin parts and Level of Detail slid all the way to Off also seems to help, but my testing was subjective and it might depend on your model. In Radeon Settings, set Antialiasing to application controlled with the SuperSampling method. I have OpenGL Triple Buffering on and Wait for Vertical Refresh set to Always on and it seems to help. I also set the very cryptic "Platform Compatibility" setting to Group C after much trial and error. This platform compatibility toggle is not documented anywhere I can find. Changing it seems to change a 0000/UMD registry value for GLPBMode (30 = A / 31 = B / 32 = C). My guess is it controls something about the OpenGL PixelBuffer.

[Certified]

It looks like the W6800 got added to the solidworks hardware certification page sometime in the last few days! They are recommending the AMD 21.Q2 driver.
https://www.solidworks.com/support/hard ... ification/

[Certified]

Quick update: AMD released the 22.Q3 driver last week and HOLY FPS BATMAN! It has completely supercharged my Radeon Pro W6800 in Solidworks 2021. I am seeing framerates 3x-4x higher than any of the previous drivers. I am also running into far fewer graphical glitches than I have in the past. I highly recommend anyone running openGL workloads on these cards give it a shot. I'm updating this old thread instead of creating a new one since not a lot of info on this is out there, and because of that this thread is on the first page of google results for "AMD w6800 solidworks".

[AlexLachance]

That's very interesting, thanks for sharing!

P.S. I crave your build

[Frederick_Law]

Yeap, posted in another thread.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-r ... nce-uplift
"AMD says it completely re-architected its OpenGL driver, which improves the performance of its GPUs by 2% ~ 115% depending on the actual graphics board and workload. AMD says its Radeon W6800 is faster than Nvidia's RTX A5000 graphics boards in several applications."