It's that time again! 3DExperience World 2025 kicks off on February 23 and runs through February 26 at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas. The show is hosted by Dassault Systèmes and highlights annual advances and improvements throughout its product ecosystem. It's a great opportunity to meet the engineers, students, and industry professionals who use SolidWorks and other Dassault Systèmes applications across browsers, local workstations, and the cloud.

One of the best parts of the event for me is showcasing how advances in silicon engineering can lead to transformational products - systems that offer performance, features, and efficiency that wasn't possible before. In 2024, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 WX-Series processor stole the proverbial show with its excellent single-thread performance, support for multi-GPU configurations for AI training, and up to 96 cores and 2T B of memory for the largest and most demanding projects. This year, AMD has complemented these full-size tower systems with compact and mobile workstations based on the new AMD Ryzen AI Max PRO Series processors. Drop by booth #919 and see the array of systems and demos on exhibit.

AMD will be launching its new generation of "RDNA 4" Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards next month, but we will likely hear more about technical details and price points from official sources around late February. Team Red had scheduled a special "launch event," but Radeon RX 9070 series leaks continue to flow online. Earlier today, reports alluded to an XT variant that allegedly sports a generous VRAM pool of 32 GB. VideoCardz has received another RDNA 4 tip-off, courtesy of Tomasz Gawroński and the AnandTech forums. Based on screenshots, Canada Computers has inadvertently revealed regional prices (minus tax) for PowerColor and XFX's opening round of custom Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 models.

Team Red is reportedly lining up an aggressive price strategy; industry insiders reckon that that baseline MSRP for the Radeon RX 9070 XT will be $599. Its non-XT sibling is expected to launch at a minimum point of $499. The Canada Computers leak seems to contain a small selection of models that hover closer to AMD's guidelines, but the majority of listed cards seemingly demand a premium upcharge. PowerColor's barebones models appear to conform closest to Team Red's recommended baseline—according to VideoCardz's conversion-crunching, the Radeon RX 9070 XT Reaper will cost $999 CAD (~$697 USD). The RX 9070 (non-XT) Reaper will come in at $839 CAD (~$586 USD). We spotted no surprises when looking up and down the list of leaked PowerColor RDNA 4 SKUs; TechPowerUp staffers handled Red Devil, Hellhound and Reaper samples at CES 2025. In sharp contrast, XFX appears to have all sorts of options lined up for launch (refer to VideoCardz's chart, below). Two unnamed demonstration units—in black or white—were on display at AMD's recent partner roundup.

MAINGEAR, the leader in premium-quality, high-performance, custom PCs, today announced the launch of its latest lineup of Pro Series Workstation PCs, meticulously engineered and configurable with the industry's most powerful components, to cater to the diverse needs of professionals across multiple industries.

Ideal for game developers, photo editors, graphics designers, videographers, 3D rendering artists, music producers, CAD engineers, data scientists, and AI/Machine Learning developers, the MAINGEAR ProWS Series introduces a range of desktop workstations crafted to crush the most intensive tasks, elevate productivity and streamline workflow.

NVIDIA RTX is spinning new cycles for designs. Trek Bicycle is using GPUs to bring design concepts to life. The Wisconsin-based company, one of the largest bicycle manufacturers in the world, aims to create bikes with the highest-quality craftsmanship. With its new partner Lidl, an international retailer chain, Trek Bicycle also owns a cycling team, now called Lidl-Trek. The team is competing in the annual Tour de France stage race on Trek Bicycle's flagship lineup, which includes the Emonda, Madone and Speed Concept. Many of the team's accessories and equipment, such as the wheels and road race helmets, were also designed at Trek.

Bicycle design involves complex physics—and a key challenge is balancing aerodynamic efficiency with comfort and ride quality. To address this, the team at Trek is using NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs to run high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, setting new benchmarks for aerodynamics in a bicycle that's also comfortable to ride and handles smoothly. The designers and engineers are further enhancing their workflows using NVIDIA RTX technology in Dell Precision workstations, including the NVIDIA RTX A5500 GPU, as well as a Dell Precision 7920 running dual RTX A6000 GPUs.