Chaos has released Chaos Vantage 2.0, in what it describes as a massive upgrade to its realistic real-time visualisation tool.

With nearly 20 major new features, Vantage is said to provide ‘easy access’ to photorealistic animations, previs and scene explorations at ‘lightning speeds’.

“In 3D, you tend to wait for quality, and people accept this, even when it disrupts their whole flow,” said Simeon Balabanov, Senior Product Manager at Chaos. “With Vantage 2, we are giving them quality, speed and flexibility in one place, so they can respond to any creative idea or client request.”

Representing years of proprietary R&D, Vantage was designed to help users ‘instantly explore’ massive 3D scenes in a fully ray-traced, real-time environment. During import, Chaos highlights that, there is no geometry to optimise, UVs to unwrap or lighting to bake. Users simply drag and drop a V-Ray scene (.vrscene), or Live-Link to Vantage from 3ds Max, SketchUp, Rhino, Revit, or Cinema 4D.

One of the headline new features is ‘Scene States’, which is designed to allow artists to use non-destructive variations to explore different styles, moods and camera angles. According to the developers, each state can easily be saved and cycled through with a click, making it easier for teams to determine which lighting, materials or post-processing effects will appeal most to their intended viewers.

To enhance realism, Vantage 2 features a host of new animation capabilities, including support for deforming meshes to support natural human movement, AXYZ’s anima 4D people and .vrscene effects that were previously only available in V-Ray.

“Vantage’s speed is just unbelievable. 20K images are taking 20 minutes,” said Dương Thanh Nguyên, Founder at BOC Studio. “This is especially helpful because our clients are looking for fewer iterations and faster feedback. Vantage helps us interact with them more effectively, so they can explore their projects, see changes and make important decisions faster — even while collaborating online.”

The new ‘Render Elements’ (aka AOVs) feature is said to prepare Vantage for the world of production rendering, which requires careful composites to achieve the best look. According to the company, rendered output can now be split into their ‘back-to-beauty’ components for real-time editing in post, enabling more artistic effects and quick integration with live-action footage.

Meanwhile, Chaos Scatter, allows millions of 3D objects to be distributed in a few clicks, forming forests, fields and crowds without weighing down the scene.

Other new features include Nvidia AI Denoiser with upscaling (for denoising or going from HD to 4K without adding more render time); new animation effects; light creation and placement; scattering fog; quality presets; HDR Monitor Support; nested .vrscenes; and a refined UI.

 Finally, Vantage can now also run on DXR-compatible AMD GPUs, as well as Nvidia GPUs.

The post Chaos Vantage 2.0 launches for real-time ray tracing appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Enscape 3.5, the latest release of the real-time visualisation tool for users of Revit, SketchUp, Archicad, Rhino and Vectorworks, now includes adjustable assets, multibounce global illumination (GI) and over 40 digital humans.

Adjustable Assets allows designers to customise materials, colours and an initial batch of entourage, making it easier to create a specific feeling for their 3D scenes. Users can adjust the materials and colours of 100 furniture items and accessories, as well as one article of clothing for 40 human assets. Over 91 vehicles can also be customised using a colour palette or via a HEX code.

Some assets include alternate options/variants, including 105 autumnal trees, 120 unpotted plants, 55 sport props, 25 street props and more.

Non-adjustable assets have also been added, including five dogs, nine trees, 22 interior assets and 93 unscanned people.

Starting in January, Enscape’s internal scanner has been creating exclusive digital humans to help architects easily add realistic people to 3D environments. With Enscape 3.5, the total has grown to 93 exclusive assets, 40 of which allow for clothing customisation. Enscape says this library will continue to get more diverse over time and there are plans to start scanning more animals and helpful objects.

Enscape 3.5 also marks the debut of a new global illumination algorithm, which is designed to provide improved lighting, reflections and rendering quality to users with GPUs built for ray-tracing, such as the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation (read our review).

According to the developers, architects will especially notice these improvements in enclosed or sun-shadowed scenes, mirrors and semi-transparent materials like frosted/tinted glass.

Additional features include a semi-transparent material ‘Alpha Channel’ export, orthographic views update for Revit, better layer assignments in Rhino, certified SpaceMouse support and Revit 2024 support.

The post Enscape 3.5 adds adjustable assets and boosts indirect lighting appeared first on AEC Magazine.

New GPU architectures are delivered from the top down. And the new Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation is very much at the top of the stack. With a price tag of £7,150 (Ex VAT), this 48 GB professional GPU is reserved for those that take design visualisation, simulation or AI extremely seriously.

The first thing to get out of the way is the name of this new workstation-class GPU. It is built on Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace architecture, named after the English Mathematician credited with being the first computer programmer.

Recently, Nvidia has used a single letter prefix for its pro GPUs — P for Pascal, T for Turing, A for Ampere, and so on.
As ‘A’ was already taken, Nvidia initially referred to the Ada Lovelace GPU as the Nvidia RTX 6000, but soon after tagged ‘Ada Generation’ on to the end, presumably to avoid confusion with 2018’s Turing-based Nvidia Quadro RTX 6000.

We don’t know why Nvidia didn’t use an ‘L’ prefix as it has done for its ‘Ada Lovelace’ datacentre GPUs (the Nvidia L4 and L40), but this is where we are at now. The Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation might be a bit of a mouthful, but at least it has a clear identity.
The workstation card

The Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation is a dual slot, full height, PCIe 4.0 workstation GPU with four DisplayPort 1.4a connectors. It looks virtually identical to its predecessor, the Nvidia RTX A6000, and has a minimal angular black and gold design. The radial type fan blows hot air directly out of the rear of the workstation via the grille on the bracket.

The total board power is 300W, which is less than its triple slot ‘Ada Lovelace’ consumer counterparts — the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 4080. Power is delivered via a single PCIe CEM5 16-pin connector.

The card has a phenomenal amount of processors: 142 third-gen RT Cores for ray tracing (delivering 211 TFLOPs), 568 fourth-gen Tensor Cores for AI compute (delivering 1,457 TFLOPs), and 18,176 next-gen CUDA cores for general purpose operations, boasting 91 TFLOPs of single precision performance. This is a significant jump up from the Nvidia RTX A6000 it replaces, which delivers RT Core performance of 76 TFLOPs, Tensor performance of 310 TFLOPs, and single-precision performance of 39 TFLOPS.

The Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada comes with 48 GB of GDDR6 memory, which should be plenty for most viz-centric workflows. However, unlike its predecessor, the RTX 6000 Ada Generation does not support NVLink, so two GPUs cannot be bridged together with an adapter to create a 96 GB memory pool. While this shouldn’t matter to most users, it could be a barrier for those working with exceptionally high poly count models / high resolution textures. It could also limit its use in engineering simulation, including Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).

48 GB is still double that on offer in the top-end consumer Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-Series. The RTX 6000 Ada also differentiates itself from Nvidia’s consumer cards in several other ways, including pro drivers, pro software certifications, support for Error Correction code (ECC) memory, and some niche features for pro viz, including stereo and Frame Lock for viz clusters.

It also supports Nvidia virtual GPU (vGPU) software, which allows a workstation to be repurposed into multiple GPU-accelerated virtual workstation instances. With workstation vendors, especially Lenovo and HP, actively making their new ‘Sapphire Rapids’ desktop workstations rack friendly, this feature is likely to be more important than ever before.

Finally, it boasts 3x the video encoding performance of the Nvidia RTX A6000, for streaming multiple simultaneous XR sessions using Nvidia CloudXR.

Optimised for visualisation

he Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada offers all the generational improvements you’d expect from a new GPU architecture, but there are also significant changes in the way the GPU carries out calculations to increase performance in viz-centric workflows.
Deep Learning Super Sampling 3 (DLSS) and Shader Execution Reordering (SER) are the two technologies that stand out.
Nvidia DLSS has been around for several years and with the new Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada, it is now on its third generation. It uses the GPU’s AI Tensor cores to boost performance.

With Nvidia’s previous generation ‘Ampere’ GPUs, DLSS 2 took a low-resolution current frame and the high-resolution previous frame to predict, on a pixel-by-pixel basis, what a high-resolution current frame would look like.

With DLSS 3, the Tensor cores generate entirely new frames rather than just pixels. It processes the new frame, and the prior frame, to discover how the scene is changing, then generates entirely new frames without having to process the graphics pipeline.

So far, we’ve only seen DLSS 3 implemented in Nvidia Omniverse, but we expect others to follow. Enscape and Autodesk VRED, for example, both support DLSS 2.

As a background to Shader Execution Reordering (SER), Nvidia explains that GPUs are most efficient when processing similar work at the same time. However, with ray tracing, rays bounce in different directions and intersect surfaces of various types. This can lead to different threads processing different shaders or accessing memory that is hard to coalesce or cache.

With SER, the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation can dynamically reorganise its workload, so similar shaders are processed together. According to Nvidia, SER can give a two to three times speed up for ray tracing and a frame rate increase of up to 25%. But these are probably extremes. For offline path tracing in Unreal Engine 5.1, for example, Nvidia quotes speed improvements of 40% or more.

Engineering simulation

In AEC, while visualisation is the primary use case for the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada, the GPU can also be used for engineering simulation.

At launch, Nvidia highlighted the use of Ansys software, including Ansys Discovery and Ansys Fluent for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).

Compared to the RTX A6000, the RTX 6000 Ada not only has more cores and faster cores, but significantly larger L2 cache (96 MB vs 6 MB) and increased memory bandwidth (960 GB/s vs 768 GB/s). According to Ansys, this results in ‘impressive performance gains’ for the broad Ansys application portfolio.

However, the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada is not suited to all simulation tools. Some simulation solvers require double precision and with relatively poor FP64 performance (which at 1,423 GFLOPSs is 1/64 of its FP32 performance), the RTX 6000 Ada is unlikely to perform that well in those that do. In fact, for double precision solvers, even 2016’s Nvidia Quadro GP100 boasts better FP64 performance of 5.17 TFLOPs.

Testing the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation

AEC Magazine put the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation through a series of real-world application benchmarks, both GPU rendering and real time visualisation.

The GPU is simply overkill for current generation CAD and BIM software, so we didn’t do any testing in that regard. However, it’s important to note that it will still be certified for the likes of Revit and Archicad, which is useful if you plan to use those types of core applications alongside more design viz focused tools like Enscape, V-Ray, Twinmotion and Lumion.

The full spec of our AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro test machine, the Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T can be seen below. Read our full review here.

Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T

• AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX processor (2.7 GHz, 4.5 GHz boost) (64-cores, 128 threads)
• 256 GB (8 x 32GB) Samsung ECC Registered DDR4 3200MHz memory
• 2TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD
• 8TB RAID array (4 x 2TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs)
• Asus Pro WS WRX80E Sage SE WiFi motherboard
• Corsair H150i Elite Cappelix RGB with Noctua fans
• 1,500W Corsair HXi, 80PLUS Platinum
• Microsoft Windows 11 Pro

For comparison, we also tested the Nvidia RTX A6000 GPU inside the same machine. Nvidia’s 528.24 pro driver was used for both GPUs.

Real time 3D

Real time 3D visualisation with applications that use OpenGL, DirectX or Vulkan graphics APIs continue to be a very important part of architectural visualisation. Key applications include TwinMotion, Lumion, Enscape and Unreal Engine.

We recorded frame rates (Frame Per Second) within Enscape, Unreal Engine, Nvidia Omniverse, and Autodesk VRED Professional, a pro viz application commonly used in automotive design.

We only tested at 4K (3,840 x 2,160) resolution. At FHD (1,920 x 1,080) , it’s a given that the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation can deliver more than enough performance.

In Enscape, we tested with five different models. Overall, our experience was incredibly smooth, even with the large RTX-enabled Enscape 3.0 building complex which uses 11 GB of GPU memory (see image earlier).

However, our preferred benchmark model, an urban scene from Enscape 3.1, was a little unresponsive, sometimes taking a few seconds to react to mouse or keyboard movements. We don’t know why this was, but it could be because it includes custom assets and textures and there is a conflict of some sort. Once it got going, however, we recorded a phenomenal 124.95 FPS, 63% faster than the Nvidia RTX A6000.

In Unreal Engine 4.26, the generation-on-generation gains were smaller. The biggest increase came when ray tracing was enabled on our Audi test model, with the RTX 6000 Ada Generation delivering 1.5 times more FPS than the RTX A6000.

In Autodesk VRED Professional 2023, performance increases ranged from 1.63 to 1.89. The biggest came when anti-aliasing was disabled.

In Nvidia Omniverse Create 2022.3.3, we tested with the Brownstone building sample model. In RTX – Real-Time mode with DLSS enabled the RTX 6000 Ada was a whopping 3.62 times faster than the RTX A6000. However, there’s a case of comparing apples with pears here as the RTX 6000 Ada uses DLSS 3 while the RTX A6000 use DLSS 2 (see earlier on). In saying that, we saw no visual difference between the two. In RTX – interactive (path tracing) mode the RTX 6000 Ada was 2.16 times faster.

Ray trace rendering

We tested with a range of GPU-accelerated ray-trace renderers, including V-Ray GPU, KeyShot, Solidworks Visualize, Nvidia Omniverse and blender.

With the V-Ray, KeyShot and blender benchmarks, the RTX 6000 Ada Generation shot ahead, outperforming the RTX A6000 by a factor of 1.93, 2.05 and 2.17 respectively. We saw similar gains in Nvidia Omniverse, with the RTX 6000 Ada taking less than half the time of the RTX A6000 to render the brownstone building scene.

However, in some of our real-world application tests, the gains were nowhere near as large. In Solidworks Visualize 2023, rendering the 1969 Camaro test scene with Nvidia Iray and the new 3DS Stellar Physically Correct global illumination engine, showed the RTX 6000 Ada to be between 32% and 40% faster than the RTX A6000.

In KeyShot 2023 the RTX 6000 Ada Generation rendered our motorbike model between 33% and 41% quicker in a range of stills and turntable animations. With KeyShot ‘s sample drone scene it went down to 23%-25%.

Conclusion

The Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation is a phenomenally powerful GPU. In several visualisation workflows, it delivered more than double the performance of the previous generation Nvidia RTX A6000. And when Nvidia has full control over both software and hardware, and the GPU’s fourth-gen Tensor cores kick in with DLSS 3, the boost in real-time performance (with seemingly no impact on end user experience) is simply breathtaking.

But these are the extremes of what you can expect from this super high-end workstation GPU. In some of our real world tests the performance increases were as low as 23%. But even this can save hours in the working day. When rendering out a 600 frame 4K animation in KeyShot 2023 for example, rendering times dropped from 6 hours 26 mins to 4 hours 50 mins.

There are some downsides to the new GPU. First, there is no NVLink, which may come as a disappointment to those really pushing the boundaries of complexity. Second it is quite power hungry, drawing 300W at peak. And finally, of course, there’s the price.

£7,150 (Ex VAT) is an incredible amount to pay for a single graphics card and considerably more than Nvidia previously charged for its top end workstation GPUs. The Nvidia RTX A6000, for example, only cost £3,730 (Ex VAT) in February 2021.

While some will consider £7,150 to be a price worth paying for the transformative effect it could have on their workflows, others may seek better value elsewhere.

The new AMD Radeon Pro W7900 (48 GB) is one such option, although it does not offer the same breadth of software support. More than ever before, perhaps Nvidia is facing its biggest competition from within. The consumer-focused ‘Ada Generation’ GeForce RTX 4090 is available for around £1,500 + VAT, but you miss out on some pro features, superior build quality and access to 48 GB of memory, double that of the 4090. And for some viz artists that’s a big deal. 48 GB allows you to work with more complex datasets and render them at higher resolutions. In simulation, engineers can increase the fidelity of the solver for more accurate results.

The additional memory will not just offer potential benefits for single app workflows. These days many viz artists to use multiple apps at the same time – render in V-Ray while working on real-time experiences in Unreal Engine, for example. And the RTX 6000 Ada Generation is much more likely to allow them to do this without having to make compromises to their workflow.

This article is part of AEC Magazine’s Workstation Special report

Scroll down to read and subscribe here

Featuring

• Battle of the desktop workstation CPUs: Intel ‘Sapphire Rapids’ vs AMD Threadripper Pro
• Cloud workstations for CAD, BIM and viz – how the major public cloud providers stack up
• Lenovo ThinkStation P7 / PX desktop workstation reviews
• ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstation round-up – Dell, HP, BOXX, Scan and Workstation Specialists
• Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation professional GPU review
• AMD Radeon Pro W7800 / W7900 professional GPUs preview
• Reimagining the desktop workstation as a remote resource
• The flexible workstation – supporting the hybrid workforce
• Sustainable cloud workstations

The post Review: Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation appeared first on AEC Magazine.

AMD has launched the Radeon Pro W7900 and Radeon Pro W7800, the first workstation GPUs to be built on AMD’s RDNA 3 architecture. Target workflows for the new high-end cards include visualisation, real-time 3D, ray trace rendering, photogrammetry, VR, simulation, video editing, compositing and more.

The AMD Radeon Pro W7900 is triple (2.5) slot GPU with 48 GB of GDDR6 memory, 61 TFLOPs of peak single precision performance and a total board power of 295W. It costs $3,999.

The AMD Radeon Pro W7800 is a dual slot GPU with 32 GB of GDDR6 memory, 45 TFLOPs of peak single precision performance and a total board power of 260W. It costs $2,499.

Both GPUs comprise multiple unified RDNA 3 compute units, each with 64 dual issue stream processors, two AI accelerators and a second gen ray tracing (RT) accelerator. According to AMD, RDNA 3 offers up to 50% more raytracing performance per compute unit than the previous generation.

AMD’s ray tracing (RT) accelerators are compatible with Unreal Engine, Unity, Lumion, Enscape, Solidworks Visualise, D5 Render, Maxon Redshift, plus other applications that support DirectX Raytracing (DXR), Vulkan ray tracing, or AMD Radeon ProRender, including Acca Edificius, Autodesk Inventor, Rhino, Autodesk Maya, and Blender.

The new GPUs will go up against the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation (48 GB). While AMD only names two benchmarks where the Radeon Pro W7900 will outpace Nvidia’s flagship pro GPU (the 3ds Max and Maya viewsets in SPECviewperf 2020), it points out that both AMD GPUs are extremely competitive on price / performance.

In SPECviewperf 2020 GeoMean, for example, AMD claims the Radeon Pro W7900 is within 7% of the performance of the Nvidia RTX A6000 Ada Generation but offers more than double the price/performance, as it costs less than half as much ($3,999 vs $8,615).

AMD also highlights support for DisplayPort 2.1, the latest version of the digital display standard which offers three times the data rate of DisplayPort 1.4. According to AMD, this means its new GPUs are future proofed for next gen displays in terms of refresh rate, pixel resolution and colour bit-depth, while pointing out that the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation supports DisplayPort 1.4.

Both the AMD Radeon Pro W7800 and W7900 feature three DisplayPort 2.1 and one Mini DisplayPort 2.1 connectors, a change from the previous generation Radeon Pro W6800 with six Mini DisplayPort 1.4.

With 48 GB, the Radeon Pro W7900 also marks a step up in terms of memory, with 50% more than its predecessor, the Radeon Pro W6800, putting it on par with the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada.

Memory is becoming increasingly important for viz workflows, not just to support extremely complex high-polygon datasets, but for multi-tasking as well, as product designer, Dr. Adi Pandzic, Ph.D, explains, “Large format renders require more horsepower, especially when doing 4K raytraced animations using [Solidworks] Visualize. The Radeon Pro W7900 allows me to easily keep working on the model [in Solidworks CAD] while rendering in the background.”

Rich Hurrey, president, founder, Kitestring, shares similar experiences, “The increased memory that the new AMD RDNA 3 GPUs offer, allows us to have multiple instances of Maya, Modo, and Unreal Engine open at the same time. All of this means that production work gets done faster and in real time.”

Memory also differentiates the new GPUs from AMD’s consumer focused RDNA 3 GPU, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX which has 24 GB. Both pro GPUs also come with AMD Software: Pro Edition. This offers professional software certifications for ‘performance and stability’, and pro features such as ViewPort Boost, which dynamically adjusts viewport resolution to boost performance, remote workstation support and more.

The AMD Radeon Pro W7000 Series workstation graphics cards are expected to be available in Q2 2023. Product availability in OEM and SI systems is expected in 2H 2023.

Look out for a full review soon.

This article is part of AEC Magazine’s Workstation Special report

Scroll down to read and subscribe here

Featuring

• Battle of the desktop workstation CPUs: Intel ‘Sapphire Rapids’ vs AMD Threadripper Pro
• Cloud workstations for CAD, BIM and viz – how the major public cloud providers stack up
• Lenovo ThinkStation P7 / PX desktop workstation reviews
• ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstation round-up – Dell, HP, BOXX, Scan and Workstation Specialists
• Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation professional GPU review
• Reimagining the desktop workstation as a remote resource
• The flexible workstation – supporting the hybrid workforce
• Sustainable cloud workstations

The post AMD Radeon Pro W7900 and W7800 workstation GPUs launch appeared first on AEC Magazine.

For its latest high-performance workstation, Scan has combined two of the most powerful workstation-class processors out there – the 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX CPU and the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU.

Coupled with 256 GB of DDR4 memory and an ultra-fast 8TB SSD RAID 0 array, this machine will likely be the envy of most design viz artists.

Given that the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation is fresh off the production line (read our review), it is arguably the silicon star of this workstation. With 48 GB of GDDR6 memory, the ultra-high-end GPU is well equipped to handle the most demanding viz datasets, both in real time 3D and ray tracing / path tracing.

It absolutely obliterated many of the benchmark records set by its predecessor, the Nvidia RTX A6000 (48 GB) (read our review). The biggest gains were seen in GPU ray tracing where the third generation RT cores really come into their own, outperforming the Ampere Generation GPU by a factor of 1.93, 2.05, and 2.19 respectively in the V-Ray, KeyShot, and blender benchmarks. This is a phenomenal generation on generation increase.

It’s no slouch in real time 3D either. In Unreal Engine 4.26 we saw frame rates with our Audi Car Configurator model increase by 1.50 and 1.41 times respectively with ray tracing enabled and disabled. The performance increase rose to 1.63 in arch viz tool Enscape 3.1, and also 1.63 in high-end automotive viz software Autodesk VRED Professional 2023.

To boost performance further, the Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T can take a second RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU, but at £7,149 (Ex VAT) per card, you’ll need seriously deep pockets. This should cut ray trace render times significantly (by up to half), but you won’t get a 96 GB pool of memory to play with like you would with two Nvidia RTX A6000s. Nvidia has dropped support for NVlink. Don’t expect an automatic improvement in 3D frame rates either, as most real time viz tools are not multi-GPU aware.

With so much processing power available through the GPU, it’s easy to forget there’s also a monster Threadripper Pro 5995WX CPU at your disposal. Rendering is an obvious beneficiary of the 64-core CPU but that’s also a job that the RTX 6000 Ada Generation does exceptional well.

Viz users often have well defined rendering pipelines that focus on either CPU or GPU and not necessarily both. That’s not always the case, of course. While V-Ray has entirely different render engines for GPU and CPU and users tend to stick to one, Solidworks Visualize can use both concurrently, and KeyShot allows you to easily swap between GPU and CPU as and when required. This could be to help free up compute resources in order to focus on other workflows, such as real time 3D, video editing or video encoding. Unreal Engine also has different compute-intensive processes that run on CPU and GPU.

CPU rendering also has the benefit of being able to work with incredibly large datasets and with 256 GB of system memory (8 x 32 GB Samsung ECC Registered DDR4 3200MHz) the Scan workstation is certainly well equipped.

With a default TDP of 280W, the Threadripper Pro 5995WX is one of the more challenging CPUs to cool. Scan uses a 360mm Corsair H150i Elite Cappelix RGB hydrocooler mounted in the Fractal Design Meshify 2 case and has replaced the fans with more efficient Noctua models.

This gives enough thermal headroom to increase all core frequencies above the base 2.70 GHz, peaking at 3.05 GHz in both Cinebench and KeyShot 2023.

It’s not the best Threadripper Pro implementation we’ve seen. The Armari Magnetar M64TPRW1300G3 (read our review), with its custom All-in-One (AIO) cooler, manages to hit 3.38 GHz in Cinebench and 3.45 GHz in KeyShot, outperforming the Scan machine by a factor of 1.05 in Cinebench and KeyShot and even more in V-Ray (1.1).

Both processors pump out some serious heat and that’s hardly surprising considering how much power they draw. When rendering in Cinebench (CPU) we recorded 474W at the socket, 550W with V-Ray GPU, and a whopping 740W when using both processors in Solidworks Visualize. The machine was fairly noisy when CPU rendering, less so when GPU rendering.

The chassis is Scan’s trademark Fractal Design Meshify 2 with 3XS custom front panel. It’s a little on the large side (542 x 240 x 474 mm), but is solid and well-built and has a ready supply of ports. Up front and top, there are two USB 3.2 Type A and one USB 3.2 Type C, with plenty more at the rear (eight USB Type-A and two USB 3.2 Type C). For networking there two superfast 10GbE NICs and WiFi 6 built in.

The Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T has some other tricks up its sleeve. While the 2TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD system drive is standard fare for workstations these days, the project drive certainly is not.

The ultra-fast 8TB RAID 0 array is built using four 2TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs mounted on an ASUS Hyper M.2 PCIe add-in card, and delivers phenomenal sequential read / write speeds. In CrystalDiskMark we recorded 24.6 GB/s read and 24.8 GB/s write, compared to 7.4 GB/s and 6.8 GB/s on a single 2TB Samsung 990 Pro.

This all sounds great on paper, but the reality is there are only certain workflows that will benefit from such fast storage and only in certain conditions. This includes engineering simulation (with gigantic datasets that don’t fit entirely into system memory), or video editing (with colossal, super high-resolution files). There may be more, and we’d love to hear what they are.

We did see a small benefit over a single SSD when copying files. A zipped file containing 90 GB of point cloud scan data delivered the biggest speed up, with the RAID 0 array finishing 35% faster. The same uncompressed dataset (7,414 scans) was 25% faster, a 3ds max dataset (60 large scene files and 4,400 smaller materials, totalling 4.6 GB) was 24% faster and a Revit dataset (68 files, totalling 4.6 GB) was 11% faster.

Of course, the downside of RAID 0 is it introduces multiple points of failure, so should one drive fail all data is lost. It makes regular backups more important than ever.

The verdict

The Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T is a serious workstation for design viz professionals, with buckets of processing power for all different workflows, from real-time to ray trace rendering, video editing and beyond. But it also comes with a serious price tag.

If £16,666 (Ex VAT) seems a lot more than you’re used to paying for a machine of this type, that’s because it probably is. The price of a Threadripper Pro CPU has increased significantly, and the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation costs considerably more than its predecessor did at launch.

But that’s the current reality of super high-end workstation hardware. Both AMD (CPU) and Nvidia (GPU) have had little in the way of competition in recent times. But with Intel’s long-awaited ‘Sapphire Rapids’ Xeon W-3400 Series CPUs now out and AMD expected to follow the consumer ‘RDNA 3’ Radeon RX 7900 XT with a pro variant, this could change.

Product Specs

Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T

■ AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX processor (2.7 GHz, 4.5 GHz boost) (64-cores, 128 threads)
■ Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU (48 GB)
■ 256 GB (8 x 32GB) Samsung ECC Registered DDR4 3200MHz memory
■ 2TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD
■ 8TB RAID array (4 x 2TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs)
■ Asus Pro WS WRX80E Sage SE WiFi motherboard
■ Corsair H150i Elite Cappelix RGB with Noctua fans
■ 1,500W Corsair HXi, 80PLUS Platinum
■ Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
■ 3 Years – 1st Year Onsite, 2nd and 3rd Year RTB (Parts and Labour) warranty

■ £16,666 (Ex VAT)
■ www.scan.co.uk

The post Review: Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Nvidia has expanded the reach of its 3D design, collaboration and simulation platform, Nvidia Omniverse, by introducing several new connectors that link standard applications through the Universal Scene Description (USD) framework.

 These include Blender, Cesium, Unity and Vectorworks. Omniverse Connectors for Azure Digital Twin, Blackshark.ai, and NavVis are coming soon, adding to the hundreds that are already available, such as Revit, SketchUp, Archicad, and 3ds Max.

Nvidia is also adding new features to the platform through the forthcoming Omniverse Kit 105 release. This includes the ‘first real time ray traced subsurface scattering shader’, as Richard Kerris, VP Omniverse platform development, Nvidia explains, “When light hits an object, depending on what that object is, a light can be refracted or split or shattered through the different types of surfaces.

“So when light hits marble or it hits something like skin, it doesn’t just bounce off of it, there’s actually parts where the light goes in, and it scatters around, but it’s very computationally hard to do.

“We were the first ones a few years ago to do real time photorealistic ray tracing and now adding to that the first real time ray trace subsurface scattering.”

Other forthcoming new features include performance improvements thanks to new runtime data transfer and scene optimisers for large ‘worlds’ and more ‘sim ready’ assets, now in the hundreds.

Nvidia has also been working closely with Microsoft to bring Omniverse Cloud to Microsoft Azure. The next stage is to bring this to Microsoft 365 to make Omniverse viewers available inside application such as Teams. From a Teams call, for example, participants will be able to teleport into a 3D environment to work and better understand what’s taking place. “Each of them will have their own experience in that 3D environment, collaboratively,” says Kerris.

“Integrating this [Omniverse] into Teams is just a natural progression of how we communicate. It’s the manipulation of the 3D world in much the same way you can do today in the 2D paradigm of the web,” he adds.

Users won’t need local processing for this. “You’ll be streaming out, in much the same way that you access the cloud through a browser,” says Kerris.

Omniverse will also be connected to the Azure IoT ecosystem, delivering real world sensor inputs from Azure Digital Twin to Omniverse models.

Everyone can be a developer

Nvidia is working to harness the power of ChatGPT for Omniverse. Kerris explains that end users will be able to use ChatGPT and instruct it to write code which they can then drop into Omniverse.

“You’ll have an idea for something, and you’ll just be able to tell it to create something and a platform like Omniverse will allow you to realise it and see your vision come to life,” he says.

Developers can also use AI-generated inputs to provide data to Omniverse extensions like Camera Studio, which generates and customises cameras in Omniverse using data created in ChatGPT. See video below

Nvidia has also announced Nvidia Picasso, a cloud service for AI powered image, video and 3D applications, designed for software developers, not for end users. “Imagine just typing in what you need, and it creates a USD-based model that you can put into Omniverse and continue on,” explained Kerris.

Finally, Nvidia has introduced its third generation of OVX, a computing system for large-scale digital twins running within Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise, powered by Nvidia L40 GPUs and Bluefield-3 DPUs.

Find this article plus many more in the March / April 2023 Edition of AEC Magazine

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Lumion 2023, the latest release of the architectural visualisation tool, has been ‘rebuilt from the ground up’.

The headline feature is a new render engine that blends both improved rasterisation and ray tracing for greater realism, with the ability to add realistic light, shadows, and reflections at the touch of a button.

The new ray tracing v0.9 effect lets users define the number of samples and bounces, giving more control over the final result.

The developers of the software explain that with ray tracing switched on, renderings will automatically show realistic indirect lighting, non-screen space reflections, contact shadows, and more. Lumion Ray tracing v0.9 works with both Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

The material workflow has been converted to full physically based rendering, taking advantage of 8 Maps that are said to bring design choices closer to reality.

According to Lumion, the result will render more natural physical properties through the accurate calculation of light conditions and a higher degree of control over the material settings.

Lumion 2023 comes with 98 new materials to help add realism, including wood, stone, brick, plaster, metal, concrete, asphalt, soil, and grass. There is also an improved glass material that lets users fine-tune details of windows and other glass surfaces. However, this is not currently compatible with ray tracing v0.9. Custom textures like relief or frostiness can also be added and ‘distorted’.

There is also an expanded content library including realistic objects, furniture (chairs couches, plant pots), fine-detail nature (plants and trees) and over 100 3D static characters.

Lumion 2023 also comes with an improved scene editor with a redesigned interface. It’s now easier to arrange and rotate assets with precision using a new ‘gizmo’. Objects can be ‘instantly aligned’ with an improved AutoSnap feature.

Other features include new camera paths that provide greater control and smoother camera movements to make it easier and faster to create animations, improved colour correction for post-processing, and a refined depth of field.

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With the release of V-Ray 6 for 3ds Max, update 1, Chaos has introduced several post-processing upgrades and time-saving GPU enhancements to the mature rendering solution.

New masking support for Lens Effects and Denoiser layers gives 3D artists more control over how their images come together. According to Chaos, whether it’s applying Lens Effects to specific lights and materials, or smoothing out part of the image, designers can now personalize their renders even faster. While in post, users can also start fine-tuning V-Ray Light Materials with Light Mix, making it easier to edit self-illuminating objects in a scene – even after rendering is complete.

Elsewhere, custom resolutions and aspect ratios are now maintained for each V-Ray camera, cutting setup time when switching cameras. Multiple camera resolutions can be batch rendered locally or via Chaos Cloud Rendering.

Artists can now export V-Ray lights, materials, modifiers and more to the rising USD file format, making it easier to exchange V-Ray data in VFX studios.

Scenes with massive amounts of textures and geometry are even less of a challenge now, says Chaos. All V-Ray Bitmaps that load when a scene opens will also be optimised for performance.

Cloud collaboration has also been improved and users can now ‘collaborate as they create’ with new tools for visual annotations and versioning. Lines, arrows and other illustrative elements can be applied to any images or sequence, while Chaos Cloud supports versions and A/B comparisons for faster iteration.

V-Ray 6 for 3ds Max can also take better advantage of GPUs. Nvidia AI Denoiser Upscaling, for example, can take an image from HD to 4K without adding more render time. V-Ray GPU can also render 4K textures with 50% less memory on average, while users also have post-production control over glass objects and materials..

Finally, for product visualizations and surfaces, V-Ray 6 for 3ds Max update 1 brings cylindrical and bump upgrades to V-Ray Decal. Designers can now ‘easily add’ anything to curved surfaces, from stickers and labels to surface imperfections. Bottles, jars, rockets, helmets, tanks – Decal’s projection will cover any curve in a few clicks. Additive bumps have also been added, so artists can blend surface and decal bumps to make highly realistic embossed logos, lettering, cracked paint, spray effects and more.

Find this article plus many more in the March / April 2023 Edition of AEC Magazine

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Find this article plus many more in the March / April 2023 Edition of AEC Magazine

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to the AEC market and will impact all areas of design. So far, the applications that have most vividly captured the public imagination have been image creation tools such as DALL-E and Midjourney, and writing tool ChatGPT, but there is so much more yet to come. In fact, AI is already automating an amazing range of creative activities. When used well, the results seem almost like magic.

In AEC, we have seen experts experiment with conceptual imagery and even master iterative design enhancements. Take, for example, the work of Hassan Ragab, which demonstrates the power of AI as a tool for architectural exploration. But many of these experiments have, up to this point, focused on the realm of concept art. How could this technology be applied to 3D models?

EvolveLab believes it has an answer, in the form of Veras, its recently released, AI-powered add-on for Revit versions released between 2019 and the present day. It uses the base 3D geometry for a design as a substrate, to which it applies prompt-based augmentations. EvolveLab has plans to create versions for SketchUp and Rhino, too.

Controllable constraints

The great thing about Veras is that the geometry gives the AI a 3D constraint that is hard to control in 2D AI tools. It won’t change the shape or volume of the building too radically, but it is amazingly quick at changing materials, environment, time of day.

The best results are delivered in perspective view, with Revit’s graphic display set to show edges and with shadows set to cast. In the Veras window, there are sliders for ‘Creativity Strength’ and ‘Style Strength’, together with the ability to adjust resolution width and how many renders you want.

The higher the strength setting, the more the AI will replace what’s in Revit. The Style Strength controls how strictly the AI adheres to a text prompt. And there’s an additional selection set that helps the AI to know whether it’s dealing with an interior or exterior shot, as well as understand aspects of nature, atmosphere (for example, fog) and whether it’s an aerial view. To control the view, the user alters the perspective view in Revit and then updates the Veras windows. All images are saved to the default image location.

The only other input box is a text prompt. Here, you can enter a description of what it is that you want to create, specifying a huge range of materials, types of glazing, environment, style (such as timber cabin, modern concrete, residential/ office), night-time, natural material, marble floors and so on. With the same text prompt, users can play with the strength and style sliders and get a different result every time, usually very realistic and with minimal fuss.

It really is an excellent way to run through many different materials and styles in a very short amount of time. The results may not always be to your liking, but change the word input or sliders, and you get a totally different look and feel. And, if you like an output, it’s possible to change the perspective view and get a similar output, although there seem to be some variances like material mapping.

The first 30 images are free. Standard subscription is $34 per month billed yearly, or $49 per month for a monthly subscription. Veras allows unlimited renderings, resolutions up to 1,334 x 768, and the rendering of up to four images simultaneously. An enterprise version is coming soon, designed to empower whole design teams.

An impressive opening gambit For the opening gambit on an AI-enabled rendering application, Veras is seriously impressive. It’s a lot more practical than the 2D generators and operates well within the constraints of actual architectural geometry.

For now, as there is still a lot of reliance on the randomness of AI, its appeal beyond conceptual work might leave it non-applicable to later design phases, but the results it delivers could certainly inspire design directions and material choices.

Veras can and will take some liberties; rendering geometry that might not be in the original, for example, and getting creative with glazing. However, I’m convinced it will be a tool that takes many projects in new, interesting directions.

Veras can generate very impressive photorealistic images, something that could be useful in presentations to clients. It also can apply materials impressively, but in order to get the best results, as with all software, it requires experimentation for the user to get to grips with how it obeys inputs.

As AI tools go, from learning from mass photos and inputs to allowing users to train them on customers’ own images and designs, I can only see AI tools like Veras becoming more and more important to firms. At the same time, outcomes will become more controllable.

Right now, text inputs are very generic. The more specific these can be, the more the architect’s specification can be reproduced faithfully. Either way, this technology has huge implications for architectural visualisation and the skills required in-house. This is the start of a revolution.

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It was only a matter of time before a developer built a building information modelling tool on top of a game engine. As a platform, Epic’s Unreal – Engine offers incredible functionality: the ability to work in a high-fidelity real-time environment; a suite of capabilities for importing 3D data; built-in team collaboration; and a constant, ongoing drive to improve frame rate and mesh quality.

While Modumate may be building on the shoulders of a giant, creating a BIM tool is still a hefty development task, particularly when you consider its need for structured data and accurate details. The net result of the company’s efforts is a modelling tool that offers a cross between SketchUp, Revit and 3ds Max, with the visual fidelity of working in a real-time rendered environment.

While modelling an initial design looks very similar to working in SketchUp, it’s a great deal more revolutionary, with a unique approach to building and refining increased levels of detail to ultimately produce a highly detailed building information model. This can be done either solo or through team collaboration, supporting up to 16 users simultaneously. Take-offs from these sections form the basis of their drawing output.

As Richman Neumann, co-founder and CEO of Modumate, explains: “Modumate has the information density, the integrity, the professional data structure for an architecture team or a builder to represent a building with deep enough semantics that Modumate can automate the production of the three core document types — bill of materials (quantities), drawing set and 3D rendering — as well as the BIM model.”

For now, the team is focusing on the small building market, but with some planned investment, it will be possible to increase Modumate’s capabilities to address MEP and get the necessary performance to drive larger models, larger projects.

According to Neumann, $300 billion out of the trillions of dollars that get spent on construction every year in the US is spent on small buildings. “We found that there’s enough of an underserved market there, and it’s the market that is least served by Revit, and there is a lot of greenfield opportunity downstream in the long tail,” he says.

“We think of Modumate as a very complementary product to Revit, in that it unlocks parts of the market that [Revit] could never touch — the builder and owner who wants a more game-like experience, as well as a faster, more enjoyable workflow for small buildings than Revit offers.”

This approach is similar to the one taken by Higharc, which we covered in the September / October edition of AEC Magazine. At Higharc, developers are working on a new BIM tool aimed at the small housebuilder in the US, having similarly identified that smaller buildings tend to be designed in AutoCAD, rather than Revit, and that an opportunity exists for an interactive, easy-to-use replacement for dumb 2D drawings.

Back at Modumate, Neumann offers more details on his product’s capabilities. “We can do 200,000 square feet (20,000 square metres) warehouses and empty shell office buildings and so forth. It’s when the information density is similar to a hospital, for example, which would need to be furnished and laid out with so much information that that’s where things start to slow down.”

While you might be surprised that a BIM application would slow down on a game engine, it’s worth understanding the incredible depth of data that Modumate is capable of handling. Prior to starting development, a lot of time and effort was put into breaking down the modelling process and much thought was paid as to how the data should be structured to improve the granularity of BIM data. Neumann’s attention to granularity in his semantic approach is very much on a par with some of the work Greg Schleusner (director of design technology, HOK) was mulling over at AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD 2022 event.

Modelling philosophy

Modumate’s BIM creation offers four levels of detail hierarchy, taking the user from napkin to very specific detail. The initial phase is the creation of what it terms a ‘massing graph’; this acts as a map of all the connections in a building and all the assemblies that will be connected. It’s the most SketchUp part of the process, but it’s not just dumb facets. Using a family of planar modelling tools, every plane, edge and vertex represents either an assembly such as a wall and a window, or a detail that connects them. The start point can be an imported 2D drawing, you can type in distances, snap or use the rounding function from a known point.

The next phase is the modelling of separator assemblies. These are the physical construction assemblies that separate spaces like walls, floors, doors, roofs, windows, stairs and so on. This is the part of the process that’s the most Revitlike, but these are actual construction assemblies that are end-user defined and are made up of parts. For example, doors have a frame and four panels, and the active panels have a slab, as well as a handle set. In addition, the handle set has a front and back handle.

Modumate is unusual in that it will appeal to users who find its modelling methodology quick, easy and a joy to the eyeballs — but even those who are seriously into modelling deep detail for accurate take-offs will find that the database has been primed for their needs when it comes to accuracy

While standard wall assemblies are included, it’s obviously possible to create very detailed custom components. The separator BIM Manager for editing these is exceptionally visual, being node-based (think Grasshopper) and can be surprisingly detailed, down to their constituent parts like individual wall studs. All this level of detail increases the quality of quantities and BoMs you get out of the system at the end. To apply an assembly, click on a ‘host’ mass in the model and then adjust to how you want it to fit.

Surface graphs are primarily about dividing up surfaces to allow for different surface finishes. You simply draw regions where you want to subdivide or split. For example, this might involve adding surface finishes to cabinets in a kitchen. The final stage is attachment of assemblies — finishes, trim, cabinets, and furniture, fixtures, and equipment, all of which can be customised. Again, you simply pick the material and click on the massing geometry to which you want to apply it. With the potential to add lots of detail, models look as they will be built.

As you work through each phase, you add detail and refinement, fleshing out the model depth. In the workspace, you can also see this increasing model richness in the textures and detail of the realtime shaded model. In other words, you start off with a facet model in white and end with what looks like a completed and textured building. It’s very compelling and feels as though all ‘architectural’ tools could learn something from this. With the level of detail factored in, it’s a by-product to get an accurate bill of materials output in Excel as the model evolves.

As this is Unreal Engine, the view and model interaction are dynamic and can be easily controlled.

Because the BIM environment is the same as the rendering environment, you get instant high-resolution renders, as well as real-time shadows when you change the time of day. You then create sections to generate DWGs, which can be taken to AutoCAD for additional work. There are plans to expand this drawing output to be fully automated, and thus needing no additional work, which would be a feature highly prized by many of those complaining of lack of productivity in today’s BIM tools.

Modumate is a desktop application, but collaboration is possible over a network. The actual design files are stored on a cloud server, and every ‘player’ ends up running Modumate like a ‘Counter Strike’ player would run a locally installed version of the game. When they edit using their local copy of the model, that request is sent to a central server that handles the document, which then updates the model and sends the new document to all collaborators. The cloud is a hot topic for nextgeneration products, and the Modumate team is currently evaluating pixel-streaming technology as another way of delivering its application. Not Figma for 3D While other BIM startups – Snaptrude and Arcol follow a similar path to collaborative interface design tool Figma for 3D associations, Neumann is not a fan. “All [Figma] did was build a fun GUI for laying out HTML and CSS relationships. There’s no such similar thing for the way that parts get arrayed in space in construction. Trying to represent the way that parts get arrayed in space has either missed the mark, stopped too short, or ended up building option trees that are almost unintelligible in the number of pages of checkboxes,” he argues.

A conversation with Neumann feels a bit like a logic bomb going off. It’s clear there has been a truly epic level of analysis of the industry and software at all levels and at every stage of this project: business opportunity, system design, hierarchy, process, data architecture, even industry trends and spends. It’s rare that you meet someone who has real clarity and has evaluated every problem from so many angles. As a small developer, this is a great asset. Stepping into the BIM cage, home to an 800lb gorilla that is Revit, even if elderly, is no experience for the faint-hearted.

Modumate is unusual in that it will appeal to users who find its modelling methodology quick, easy and a joy to the eyeballs — but even those who are seriously into modelling deep detail for accurate take-offs will find that the database has been primed for their needs when it comes to accuracy. Team play certainly looks interesting, although I wonder how many customers use it. It looks very similar to Arkio, although participants are modelling real BIM, not conceptual blocks.

The key limitations of Modumate for now appear to be its lack of curved geometry and its focus on small buildings. That said, there is a viable market in the US, with some potential to support young upstarts with big BIM ambitions. It would take a number of large firms to engage with the Modumate team and encourage expanded development to cater to more complex building styles and content. However, that team is pretty savvy to focus on a market where there is not much overlap with Revit and to generate a little heat.

Modumate is certainly at a stage worthy of evaluation. It’s free to view Modumate models and an authoring seat costs $80 per user, per month.

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