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.

Intel's Arc Pro A40, A30, and Arc Pro A30M for laptops were announced back in August last year, these are still only available to OEMs, and it appears that Intel is not focused on driver updates for its Arc Pro series as it is for its gaming Arc series graphics card lineup. The latest Arc Pro 31.0.101.4092 WHQL driver is the first driver update in 4 months.

The previous driver was released back in December last year, and while we do not know how popular Intel Arc Pro series is, since there are currently only two desktop and one mobile graphics card, four months are still a long time between driver updates. The latest one focuses on certification for professional applications, including various Autodesk software, Siemens, Vectorworks, Dassault Systèmes Solidworks, and others. It also includes several fixes for some of those applications.

At the second annual Capsaicin SIGGRAPH event, AMD unveiled new professional graphics cards designed to dramatically accelerate the pace of professional content creation today, while enabling creators to take bold new steps into the more demanding workflows of tomorrow. Based on AMD's next-generation "Vega" GPU architecture, the Radeon Pro WX 9100 and Radeon Pro SSG professional graphics cards defy convention, introducing advanced technology never before seen in the professional space that reduces or eliminates traditional content creation barriers, empowering artists, designers and engineers to better realize their visions.

"Today we're seeing the convergence of our professional markets. Real-time visualization, graphics virtualization, and machine intelligence are coming together to enable extraordinary new possibilities for professionals, and no one is better positioned to win than AMD. Radeon Pro was built on the promise of enabling the art of the impossible, giving professional content creators a means to realize even their wildest ambitions. But their visions and the technology needed to achieve them is a moving target, an unending challenge that demands more from creators and the technology they use every year. With the new Radeon Pro WX 9100 and Radeon Pro SSG, we're breaking new ground and we can't wait to see how you unleash this power," said Ogi Brkic, general manager, professional graphics, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD.

AMD today announced that its powerful physically-based rendering engine is becoming open source, giving developers access to the source code. As part of GPUOpen, Radeon ProRender (formerly previewed as AMD FireRender) enables creators to bring ideas to life through high-performance applications and workflows enhanced by photorealistic rendering. Alongside Radeon ProRender, developers also have access to Radeon Rays on GPUOpen.com, a high-efficiency, high-performance, heterogeneous ray tracing intersection library for GPU, CPU or APU on virtually any platform. GPUOpen is an AMD initiative designed to assist developers in creating ground-breaking games, professional graphics applications and GPU computing applications with superior performance and lifelike experiences, using no-cost open development tools and software.

Radeon ProRender plugins are available today for many popular 3D content creation applications, including Autodesk 3ds Max, SOLIDWORKS by Dassault Systèmes and Rhino, with Autodesk Maya coming soon. Radeon ProRender works across Windows, OS X and Linux, and supports AMD GPUs, CPUs and APUs as well as those of other vendors.

Today at Autodesk University 2015, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) unveiled the AMD FirePro W4300 for the best Computer-Aided Design (CAD) performance that fits both small form factor (SFF) and tower workstations. The AMD FirePro W4300 card expertly integrates a powerful GPU and 4GB of GDDR5 memory within a low-profile design for installation in SFF as well as full-sized systems. Organizations can now confidently simplify their IT management by standardizing on a single, capable professional graphics solution throughout their workstation deployment.

The AMD FirePro W4300 professional graphics card is optimized for the latest CAD applications including Autodesk AutoCAD, Inventor as well as Revit, Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS and CATIA, PTC Creo, Siemens NX, and many more. Engineering professionals can efficiently work with large geometry-intense models and apply GPU-accelerated features in their projects, such as the new Order Independent Transparency (OIT) mode supported in SOLIDWORKS. Users can help increase productivity by visualizing their workflows across up to six displays, and up to 4K and 5K resolution.

NVIDIA today launched NVIDIA GRID 2.0 with broad industry support for its ability to deliver even the most graphics-intensive applications to any connected device virtually. Nearly a dozen Fortune 500 companies are completing trials of the NVIDIA GRID 2.0 beta. Major server vendors, including Cisco, Dell, HP and Lenovo, have qualified the GRID solution to run on 125 server models, including new blade servers. NVIDIA has worked closely with Citrix and VMware to bring a rich graphics experience to end-users on the industry's leading virtualization platforms.

NVIDIA GRID 2.0 delivers unprecedented performance, efficiency and flexibility improvements for virtualized graphics in enterprise workflows. Employees can work from almost anywhere without delays in downloading files, increasing their productivity. IT departments can equip workers with instant access to powerful applications, improving resource allocation. And data can be stored more securely by residing in a central server rather than individual systems.

NVIDIA today introduced the industry's first visual computing appliance -- enabling businesses to deliver ultra-fast GPU performance to any Windows, Linux or Mac client on their network.

The NVIDIA GRID Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) is a powerful GPU-based system that runs complex applications such as those from Adobe Systems Incorporated, Autodesk and Dassault Systèmes, and sends their graphics output over the network to be displayed on a client computer. This remote GPU acceleration gives users the same rich graphics experience they would get from an expensive, dedicated PC under their desk.

NVIDIA announced today the expansion of its award-winning line of NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions based on the NVIDIA Fermi architecture. The mid-range Quadro 2000 with 192 NVIDIA CUDA processing cores and the entry-level Quadro 600 with 96 CUDA processor cores now bring the computational and visualization benefits of the breakthrough Fermi architecture to all segments of the market.

The Quadro 2000 delivers 1.5 times the geometry performance of the previous Quadro graphics processing unit (GPU) mid-range solution and utilizes the new NVIDIA Scalable Geometry Engine technology to deliver dramatically higher performance across leading CAD and DCC applications such as SolidWorks and Autodesk 3ds Max.

AMD today announced that its entire line of industry leading ATI FirePro professional graphics accelerators are powering all-new OEM workstations for engineering, digital content creation and science professionals. AMD helps ensure that its ATI FirePro professional graphics accelerators maximize application performance and reliability by performing over 90 certifications with leading application providers such as Autodesk and Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks.

"The Dell Precision T7500, T5500 and T3500 and ATI FirePro graphics deliver an excellent balance of value and performance to workstation professionals," said Greg Weir, senior manager, Dell Product Group. "Dell, the world's leading supplier of workstations, is working with ATI to deliver workstation solutions that are reliable and scalable."

Dassault Systèmes (DS), a world leader in 3-D and product life-cycle management (PLM) solutions, and Microsoft Corp. today launched Microsoft Virtual Earth -3DVIA (Technology Preview). This free online application, developed by Dassault Systèmes, allows consumers to imagine and create realistic 3-D models - such as of buildings and structures - then share them through Microsoft Virtual Earth and online communities.