Engineering students mostly worry about the graphics card whether 2 GB or more would be enough for their engineering works or not. It depends upon the use of these engineering students. If such students use it for light works, for example, PowerPoint presentations, light execution of some lines of code, IDBMS works, or research work, they won’t require a much stronger graphics card as compared to the other heavy rendering tasks.
“Rendering or image synthesis is the process of generating a photorealistic or non-photorealistic image from a 2D or 3D model using a computer program. The resulting image is referred to as the render”, Wikipedia.
A good graphics card would be strongly required for rendering rather than other tasks in engineering.
Programs like AutoCAD, SolidWorks, and MATLAB need high processing with a medium level of the graphics card. In this case, a solid and fast processor would be more worthy than a super graphics card.
Let us have a look at some of the advantages that can be gained by having a graphics card in engineering studies.
Benefits
Following are the benefits that can be achieved through an external graphics card in a system.
Parallel programming
Graphics card is an essential need for computer engineering students especially when they want to do parallel programming. Several applications run in parallel like multimedia, scientific and general-purpose apps. A graphics card would be worthwhile in parallel applications. Also, Comp Engineering students can learn a lot about parallel programming by working on CUDA and OpenCL toolkits which are supported by GPU cards in general.
Graphics Card for AutoCAD
In general, you need a graphics card for 3D modelling. 2D modelling won’t require you to go for a powerful graphics card. So, if you are working with 2D models, then, it would be good to invest in RAM and processors rather than investing in a graphics card.
You can choose NVIDIA GPUs to get the appropriate rendering speed in particular whereas NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti, NVIDIA RTX 2080, NVIDIA RTX 2070, and NVIDIA RTX 2060 are all the other recommendations of GPUs that you can have for awesome performance.
Big Assemblies in SolidWorks
Most models are comfortable with a 2GB graphics card in SolidWorks. The biggest assemblies only use a touch more when viewed at 4K resolution. But to deliver new levels of performance and open up the CPU bottleneck, GPU plays an important role in better performance.
SolidWorks requires a professional, fully-certified graphics card that runs the OpenGL engine to function correctly. SolidWorks do their own graphics card testing, not using a certified driver which has been known to lead to graphical glitches within the software.
Game Development
A graphics card would be much appreciated when you are playing games. But, have you ever thought of game development? Of course, it, too, needs a tremendous graphics card to take a stab at game development. That’s because popular game development tools can leverage that pixel-pushing horsepower.
Editing software
Various editing software applications can have a tangible performance if a good graphics card is installed. For example, Adobe Photoshop is used for serious photo editing, lightroom is used for lightweight photo editing as well as a photo library management and Premiere Pro is used for video editing and rendering video. With a stronger graphics card, the system will take less time to apply filters and special effects to videos. It will also show better performance when displayed on a 4k resolution screen.
Windows Itself Benefits
Windows itself benefits from graphics cards. Certain elements of the user interface, including transparency effects and animations, become smoother and faster with a graphics card. You would notice a slower performance and odd display glitches like a black box where something should be displayed if you are using a computer with older hardware or have insufficient memory.
To sum up, it can be observed that a graphics card stands more useful in engineering studies. A 2GB graphics card would be enough for light works and CPU-intensive works, but it would be very important to have a bigger graphics card for high resolution, game development, or 3D modelling, etc. Indeed, the new technology would always bring a better performance during engineering studies.
