Hello,

I am a student at the University of Minnesota working on a large render for our Formula SAE team. I built a workstation over the winter with dual xeon cpus, 12 gigs of ram, some SSD hard drives and a quadro 4000 gpu. I can give more details if needed. Anyways, I have done a hand full of small renders in the past but am trying to do a full assembly of our car with realview and all the nice reflections so it looks professional for sponsors. Basically I want to get all the performance I can out of my machine because the last time I did a couple minute render it took over a day. My first question is about CUDA or using your GPU to render. Does Solidworks currently do this or what is the best to use for this application? I read some articles where some people used there GPU to render videos and it cut the time by a third! If solidworks or photoworks does not do this, is anyone else doing a similar thing with other software. The other idea I had was to splice the render up into different segments and then re render them all together in another program. I am not sure though if this is possible, well it might be possible but will soldiworks output them precisely enough that the frames will match up nicely. Anyways, any and all information would be great.

Thank,

Gavin