Starting with SolidWorks 2014 Beta 2, users will be able to test a new rendering system based on real-time ray tracing. SolidWorks and Imagination Technologies have worked together to develop RealView Plus, a new view mode to deliver a fully ray traced SolidWorks viewport in real time. The RealView+ feature is based on Imagination’s PowerVR OpenRL technology. RealView Plus will be available as a beta feature throughout all of SolidWorks 2014. We are inviting you all to try it and tell us what you think. Please report any issues you find as Beta Service Requests.

In SolidWorks 2013, the possible viewport render modes are standard OpenGL, RealView, and PhotoView 360 Integrated Preview. Our reason for introducing RealView Plus in SolidWorks 2014 is to offer users a real time working viewport that more closely matches what you can expect to see in your PhotoView 360 renders than RealView does. RealView Plus is meant to be used the same way you use RealView. You can model your part from scratch, move components, apply and modify appearances, and see your part rendered photo-realistically, all in one view mode. Ray tracing introduces new effects, like reflection of other parts in the scene and refraction, which were not possible in RealView. For a demonstration of RealView Plus, please see the video attached to this post.

Although RealView Plus works on all machines that meet the system requirements (listed below), RealView Plus is optimized to work in conjunction with Caustic Graphics’ Ray Tracing Unit (RTU) hardware. Learn more about Caustic Graphics’s new RTU hardware at https://www.caustic.com/series2/.

System Requirements

• You must have at least six logical cores in your CPU. The easiest way to know how many logical cores you have is to check how many CPU Usage History graphs you have in Task Manager:

          I have a four-core CPU with Hyper Threading enabled. The screen shot above shows I have eight logical cores.

• In the future, you will be able to run RealView Plus if you have an RTU from Caustic Graphics even if you don’t meet the CPU requirement.

Limitations

There are some known limitations in the version of RealView Plus released in beta 2:

1. Only one viewport can be ray traced at a time.
2. Some appearances do not look right.
3. There is a significant delay when launching RealView Plus with a large model.
4. In an assembly, dragging a component mated to another component will only update the component you selected. This can be fixed with a full rebuild (Ctrl + Q).
5. Decals are not supported.
6. Section view is not supported.

Please file Beta Service Requests for any other issues you encounter.

Registry Entry

To enable the UI entry for RealView Plus, you need to run a registry file. See the files attached to this post:

RealViewPlus_ON.reg     - Enables the UI control for RealView Plus

RealViewPlus_OFF.reg:  - Disables the UI control for RealView Plus