Engineers, architects and manufacturers are past the VR tipping point, and choosing the right graphics card is key to getting the most out of this transformative tech.
There’s nothing quite like the first time you don a virtual reality (VR) headset and step into another world. It’s mesmerizing. That oft-quoted Clarke pearl captures it perfectly: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
VR feels like magic. Nonetheless, for consumers, the technology has been slow to catch on. VR headsets can be cumbersome and expensive, and VR games are limited. Many make do with the occasional visit to a VR arcade and the hope that the technology will eventually reach a tipping point for consumers.
But for professional users, that tipping point has come and gone. Engineers, architects, manufacturers and pros in almost every industry have quietly incorporated VR into their everyday workflows. It’s changed how engineers review designs, how manufacturers plan factories, how architects visualize buildings and more.
“I really can’t think of a single major professional market that isn’t being touched by VR,” Carl Flygare, NVIDIA professional visualization marketing manager for PNY Technologies, told engineering.com.
We’ve written about some of the enterprise VR headsets available for engineers, but the headset is only part of the solution. For professional users, GPUs (graphics processing units) are a key enabler of the transformative technology—and it’s important to choose the right graphics card for your needs.
How engineers and others are using VR
Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) is one of the industries most eagerly adopting augmented and virtual reality solutions. With VR, AEC professionals can virtually walk through projects that haven’t been built. This allows them to spot flaws, make design decisions and get an intuitive feel for the space that simply can’t be achieved with renderings or BIM models alone. And VR is without question the best way to show off a design to a client.
“If they like a different material, the architects can swap it out and they can immediately see the difference,” Flygare says. VR also lets architects and their clients see the building at different times of day, during different seasons, even in different weather conditions—all with photorealistic lighting, in minutes, without ever leaving the room.
Most AEC firms have realized just how powerful a tool VR is. In an engineering.com survey of AEC professionals published earlier this year, we found that fully two-thirds of respondents have used VR in their professional role. And AEC firms that use VR do so frequently, with 64 percent of users reporting that their company uses VR “often” for architecture, construction or other related purposes.
Manufacturers are also reaping the benefits of AR and VR technology, which offers an immersive way to conduct design reviews. Just as architects can visualize a building in different lighting conditions or with different materials, designers can visualize their products as they would look in real life, seeing subtle details of texture and light that update in real time with a user’s perspective. Even the most realistic rendering can only offer a single snapshot in space and time.
VR is also increasingly being used for ergonomic studies, according to Flygare, in which human-operated machines are virtually tested to determine the best possible setup. “This could range from an airliner to an automobile to a forklift to pretty much anything,” he says.
Many enterprise VR headsets include eye tracking that allows designers to study where operators are looking, enabling them to create a layout that puts crucial info exactly where it needs to be.
“If you’re designing an airplane cockpit, you want all of the vital information to be immediately accessible as quickly as possible to the pilot and copilot,” Flygare says. “That can make all the difference between a great design and something that—quite frankly—ends up as a smoking hole on the ground.”
The examples don’t end there. From doctors virtually controlling robots for surgery to retailers using VR for product customization and military officers using it for immersive situational awareness, virtual reality has established itself as an important tool for many professional use cases.
Why graphics cards matter for VR
By its nature, VR has high graphical requirements. It works by rendering a slightly different image for each eye, meaning that an HD resolution actually requires a 4K output (2K pixels per eye). It also needs to work quickly, since a refresh rate that’s too low can appear choppy and make users feel motion sick. Discrete graphics cards are the best way to meet these requirements.
That doesn’t mean that you’ll have to spend top dollar for the highest-end GPU, however. As Flygare points out, VR-capable hardware has become much more accessible in recent years.
“When VR first came out, it was confined to the top-level [graphics] cards,” Flygare says. “But now every NVIDIA RTX board, from the RTX A2000 12GB all the way up through the mighty RTX 6000 Ada, is VR capable.”
For users, that means a wider array of graphics options that caters to different use cases. It’s no longer a question of whether a card will support professional VR applications, but to what degree. For example, an architect that wanted to walk through a single building in VR could do so with the entry-level RTX A2000, Flygare says, but if they wanted to visualize an entire urban setting, they would be better served by the higher compute power of a card like the RTX 6000 Ada.
Graphics cards also play a big role in creating VR content, especially the 3D models that populate a scene. NVIDIA has been developing generative AI applications that could be used to create 3D assets for VR quickly and easily. It’s part of a pivot to what the company calls neural graphics, which uses AI to boost the performance of its graphics cards.
“NVIDIA has taken traditional rasterized graphics pipelines and turned it into something more sophisticated and fundamentally new, which is a neural graphics pipeline that uses the best of FP32 compute, the best of RT Core performance and the best of AI techniques that are implemented on Tensor Cores to produce images at much higher frame rates, much more quickly and at much higher quality,” Flygare says.
In other words, VR users will get to experience ever greater virtual worlds—and use them to design better products, build better buildings and improve myriad other professional workflows. Now that’s magical.
