Whether you're building a PC or want to ensure your laptop is powerful enough, you'll want to be thoughtful in choosing the best GPU for Solidworks in 2024. Your graphics card is much more important than a CPU—after all, Solidworks needs higher clock speeds vs multi-core processing.
This list includes both workstation graphics cards and gaming GPUs, but if the purpose for your card is strictly for business, I'd recommend focusing on the workstation GPUs so that you don't lose out on their warranties geared toward business applications.
This list includes, of course, the top-line GPUs but we'll also touch on cheaper value picks as well. Solidworks themselves recommend NVIDIA cards for 3d rendering, which are better built to handle heavy demand in typical use. However, you don't necessarily need to avoid AMD cards.
Upfront, I will say that I've tested all of these cards personally for mechanical engineering, and the NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti is the best overall for Solidworks — it works like a charm with complex assemblies and intense simulations.
Let's dive in to the full list:
Best Overall Graphics Card for SolidWorks
The 3080 Ti is my favorite GPU for 3d editing software given its amazing overclocking potential, and has a fantastic stock air cooler, with relatively quiet fans (as long as you're below 80%). Overheating can be an issue if you don't have great airflow, so just be careful there.
Price can seem a bit expensive, but I actually think this is one of the best values you can get at this range — it's $500 cheaper than the 3090 with almost identical performance with rendering and running simulations.
Best GPU for 3D Rendering and Simulation
The Quadro RTX 4000 scores nearly a perfect 0 for rendering and simulation on the Solidworks performance test and is a great GPU to handle the 2024 Solidworks version.
It uses the latest Turing architecture and has advanced rendering in realtime that makes it a beast for professionals, though I've personally found performance and overheating to be a slightly worse than the 3080 Ti, but this is also a few hundred dollars cheaper on Amazon.
Best Budget GPU for Solidworks
The AMD 6950XT is the cheapest graphics card for solidworks on this list, but actually can go toe-to-toe with a lot of NVIDIA cards out there, and is a much better value. Sure, it might not be the best of the best, but it can handle 4k rendering with ease, and I actually quite like AMD's Software Suite, which comes with automatic driver updates, performance monitoring and overclocking features directly in AMD Software. It's great especially for someone who is looking for a gaming GPU in addition to running Solidworks.
The biggest downside is that the video engine is definitely weaker than NVIDIA's and AMD's driver QA and refinement is just not as thorough as NVIDIA.
What's your favorite GPU for SolidWorks or autoCAD? Let me know in the comments down below. Also, be sure to check out our guide to the best laptops for Solidworks.