AutoCAD 2011 Designers Achieve Maximum Productivity With NVIDIA Quadro Certified Graphics

Quadro professional graphics solutions enable better designs, more visual accuracy, faster 3D performance, and higher reliability.

SANTA CLARA, Calif — NVIDIA announced today that AutoCAD 2011 designers looking to improve their workflow can now turn to the visual accuracy, fast 3D performance and high reliability of newly certified NVIDIA® Quadro® graphics processing units (GPUs).

As strategic partners, Autodesk and NVIDIA collectively spend more than 2,000 engineering hours annually certifying Quadro GPUs for AutoCAD. In addition, NVIDIA has invested over 10 years in application specific optimizations, resulting in the industry’s best AutoCAD performance.

AutoCAD 2011 brings powerful new features and visual styles to designers working with 2D plans or creating 3D models. These features, combined with a professional-class Quadro GPU, let designers dial up the complexity of their designs, visualize them in software and work out any issues before moving to “sticks and bricks,” thereby increasing productivity and eliminating waste.

“Autodesk certifies and recommends NVIDIA Quadro for use with AutoCAD 2011,” said Guri Stark, Autodesk vice president, AutoCAD and Platform Products. “By upgrading to a Quadro, millions of AutoCAD users worldwide can take full advantage of the application’s newest 3D features, experience superior image quality, and realize true interactive performance.”

Designers running AutoCAD 2011 on Quadro professional GPUs can also realize significant performance increases. AutoCAD benchmarks show Quadro delivering:

* Up to 6x higher performance in ‘3D Hidden’ visual style
* Up to 3x faster interactive manipulation of models in ‘Conceptual’ visual style
* Up to 2x gains in speed with the ‘Realistic’ and new ‘Shades of Gray’ visual styles†

In addition, only Quadro users will be able to experience dramatically higher image quality using the ‘Smooth Lines’ option (enabled by hardware anti-aliasing) in all of the visual styles in AutoCAD 2011. When zooming, panning, and spinning, Quadro GPUs maintain interactivity and deliver a visually accurate model all of the time, while other systems may simplify the model and lose visual fidelity.

“For designers who spend a portion of their day working with AutoCAD, Quadro is a smart, cost-effective investment that increases productivity,” said Jeff Brown, NVIDIA general manager, Professional Solutions Group. “Streamlined workflows can easily save a designer 30 minutes a day, and for a firm with five designers, this translates to a benefit of more than $100,000 over three years.††”

NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics are designed to enhance the complete Autodesk AutoCAD 2011 software portfolio, including: AutoCAD Architecture 2011, AutoCAD Electrical 2011, AutoCAD Mechanical 2011, and AutoCAD MEP 2011. Quadro graphics solutions are engineered, built, and tested by NVIDIA to provide maximum performance and reliability. With an extended 24-36 month product life cycle and three-year warranty, IT managers can standardize on a supported Quadro system for a longer period of time.

NVIDIA Quadro solutions are available from major workstation manufacturers and system integrators, and are featured in the newly introduced, sub-$1000 systems designed for AutoCAD: the Dell Precision T1500, the HP Z200 and the Lenovo ThinkStation E20. Quadro products are also available through reseller partners via PNY Technologies in the Americas and Europe, Leadtek throughout Asia Pacific, and ELSA in Japan.