- [Instructor] As mentioned previously, video card selection
can be very important for your workstation.
This gives your system its display
and graphics processing power.
Video card selection is also interesting,
because SOLIDWORKS certifies only certain cards
to be used with their software.
Their main certifying partner being NVIDIA.
Having a certified SOLIDWORKS video card
paired with the correct driver
ensures that SOLIDWORKS will perform optimally
and also have the ability
to use the RealView Graphics feature,
which is not available with a non-certified graphics card.
Now depending on your work
you may want a very powerful card to give you
the added support when creating renderings or animations,
but if your budget is a factor
you may want to go with a card that's less powerful,
because you know it isn't going to
have to do as much work for you.
Let's start here by checking the graphics card
that's in my machine right now.
To do so I'm going to go down to the Start button,
right-click, and then go up to the Device Manager.
When looking for your video card
it won't say video card here in the list,
but it'll say Display adapter.
So by going to Display adapter
we see that I have an NVIDIA Quadro M4000.
Now I mentioned before that NVIDIA
is one of the main certifying partners
for video cards for SOLIDWORKS.
But let's look online and make sure
that we have a certified card in this machine.
So going to solidworks.com,
I go to Support,
I then go to Hardware & System Requirements,
and here I'm going to click on Graphics Card Driver.
Now you'll see here that they give you
a bunch of drop-down menus
where you're going to select exactly what you have.
So the first selection isn't really important,
unless you've got a prepackaged machine,
I know a lot of people build their own workstations now,
I do personally,
but if you do have a purchased machine
from one of these certified members
you can select that here.
I don't, so I'm going to select Any System Vendor.
I'm looking for a Driver Status that is Certified.
You can also check to see if it's been tested.
There are some drivers and video cards
that have been tested, but not certified.
So I'm going to go to my Graphics Card Vendor,
I know that I have a NVIDIA.
I have a Model Quadro M4000.
I'm using the 2018 SOLIDWORKS version
and I'm doing that on a Windows 10 64 bit machine.
Let's see the results.
Clicking on the results below
we see that the Certified
that's Recommended Driver is listed below.
So now this lists 37.11.
You can see listed below that it passes
all of the extra features,
except for the RealView with limitations.
I'm going to click on this link right here
and if I do so it'll let me download the driver
if I don't have it available.
Now right now we're going to want to check
and see which driver we have available.
We know that our graphics card is good
and we know that it has a driver that's certified.
So going back to the Device Manager
I'm going to right-click on this Quadro M4000
and go to Properties,
and then Driver.
Here you see that my Driver Version
is 22.21.13.8248.
This is an older driver.
Because right now I'm doing work
and I don't want to mess with anything
I'm going to leave this alone.
This driver works good for me.
But if I wanted to all I would have to do
is click on this extension below
and install the driver.
It has an automated process inside of it
that handles everything.
Now one of the things I mentioned with this driver
is that it has the RealView graphics available.
So let's open up SOLIDWORKS parts
and see how we use this.
So here you can see I've got a valve that's modeled up,
it's a downloaded product I got offline, off mcmaster.com,
they have a lot of nice models.
Up here on the right under the View Settings
I have RealView Graphics selected and on.
So you can see what it looks like on.
When I turn it off you can see
that the graphics step down substantially
and it does not look even close to as nice.
Now one thing to note,
if you want to increase your performance
you'll want to turn all of these options off.
These are only for when you want increased graphics,
not increased performance.
So there's a balancing game here
where you want to have the best performance
or the best graphics
and you have to decide what works best for you.