Help Choosing a GPU for Fusion 360 (GPU Budget $300)

[Anonymous]

Hey Everyone,

I'm building a CAD PC for friend, and he manily uses Fusion 360.  I've been trying to figure out what the best GPU option would be for the build with a GPU budget of around $300. 

I'm leaning towards getting a Geforce GTX 1660 Super 6 GB but I don't know how well Fusion 360 performs on non-CAD GPUs.  Is there a Quadro or FirePro GPU I should choose instead?   If anyone has a GTX 1660 on this forum I'd like to here what there experiences have been like.  And any other helpful opinions on GPUs are more than welcome.

Thanks,

[leowarren34]

Hi @Anonymous,

Fusion 360 is not GPU Accelerated so buying a Quadro or Firepro is a waste of money in most cases.

However, Fusion 360 does need VRAM which means you can't entirely ignore the GPU.

6GB of VRAM should be plenty for Fusion, I have an RTX 2070 8GB and I get nowhere near 6GB on Fusion. Obviously you can reach that with enough occurrences.

I'd check out tesreg which has a good database: https://tesreg.com/

[TrippyLighting · Accepted solution]

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@leowarren34 wrote:

Hi @Anonymous,

Fusion 360 is not GPU Accelerated so buying a Quadro or Firepro is a waste of money in most cases...

Whaaaat ? 😉

The FirePro and Quadro cards have optimized and certified OpenGL software drivers for a host of CAD and graphics applications. That is one of the reasons they are more expensive. The hardware is mostly the same as performance equivalent consumer/gaming cards.

Fusion 360 and Autodesk Inventor use the DirectX API and not OpenGL. As such, buying a more expensive GPU with optimized OpenGL drivers will not result in any performance gains.

[Anonymous]

In your opinion, would it be better to stick with the GTX 1660 Super for Fusion 360 or should I buy a Quadro/Firepro GPU in the same price range?  I'm just not sure how much performance is to be gained with one of these CAD focused GPUs over a GTX card in the same price range.

[TrippyLighting]

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@Anonymous wrote:

In your opinion, would it be better to stick with the GTX 1660 Super for Fusion 360 or should I buy a Quadro/Firepro GPU in the same price range?  I'm just not sure how much performance is to be gained with one of these CAD focused GPUs over a GTX card in the same price range.

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I thought I just answered that question in my last post!

The Quadro/Firepro graphics cards are OpenGL optimized graphics card.

Fusion 360 and Autodesk inventor do NOT use Open GL but DirectX.

So stick with a gaming card!

Here is a very interesting YouTube video, which compares different graphics cards in the context of Autodesk Inventor. Even graphics performance appears to be very CPU ( not GPU) dependent.

So why am I am referring to Autodesk Inventor and that youtube video?

The guy making the video is a very experienced professional CAD administrator who frequently has to deal with just these questions in a company that uses 100+ seats of Autodesk Inventor and his performance tests are based purely on that CAD application.

Also, there are 2 areas where Autodesk Inventor and Fusion 360 are very similar.

1. Both use the DirectX API to "talk" to the GPU

2. Both use the same geometric modeling kernel.

[Anonymous]

I'll check out The TFI youtube video you linked.  I've acutally been watching his videos on xeon vs core processors and CAD build advice the last few days.  I'm glad to hear I'm on the right track.  TFI seems too be pretty knowledgeable source when it come to Autodesk Inventor inparticular. 

Thanks TrippyLighting I appreciate the all the advice.

[Anonymous]

Thanks leowarren34 its good to hear input from someone who running a non CAD card.  I'm definitely going to check out the tesreg database.  Thanks for the suggestion.

[leowarren34]

@Anonymous I'd second TrippyLightning's advice in regards to TFI (Neil) - He's a super cool guy over on the Inventor forum and did a super class at AU all on hardware for Inventor (Link below). When it came to the GPU section of the talk - 'Going up from an entry-level graphics card to something expensive will not give you so much a single frames per second increase'. He tested going from a P2000 (~£500) to a P5000 (~£2000).

Full class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvPX0BxljW4

Short Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNsXzIezGFw

[lance.carocci · Accepted solution]

You don't need workstation hardware to run Fusion 360 (or any other Autodesk product, to my knowledge). Workstation hardware isn't much different physically from its consumer/gaming counterparts - a lot of it is software drivers, application optimization, and technical support.

Many of us at Autodesk run Fusion on integrated graphics, such as the Intel UHD 620 (I'm running Fusion on some home devices with an RTX 2070 and a 710 GT), and ultraportable laptops.

As other users have mentioned, Fusion tends to lean harder on the CPU than GPU, with many operations being single-threaded. In short, after meeting the recommended requirements to run Fusion (a 1660 Ti is a great mid-range choice), CPU clockspeed (i.e. raw Ghz) is probably the best performance return for Fusion, as many timeline-based operations rely more on floating point calculation rather than graphics processing.

Side note: Fusion 360 uses both OpenGL and DirectX (versions 9 and 11), depending on user hardware support.

[TrippyLighting]

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@lance.carocci wrote:

Side note: Fusion 360 uses both OpenGL and DirectX (versions 9 and 11), depending on user hardware support.

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Can you elaborate on that?

AFAIK on Windows Fusion 360 uses DirectX and on macOS, it uses OpenGL (for obvious reasons).

Is that incorrect?

The only other scenario I could imagine is that Fuosn 360 uses DirectX or Open GL in Windows but what would determine which?

There's definitely no DirectX on macOS.

[lance.carocci]

That's a bingo! But OpenGL is also an option on Windows, and often utilized in compatibility scenarios, alongside software rendering.

[Bajicoy]

That's a good youtube video, I hope it is still relevant after all these years and it helps me know I need the fastest single core cpu performance I can get my hands on and any gpu with +6 VRAM.

[plrandel25]

i am running fusion on my acer predator helios 300 which has a gtx 1660 ti graphics card, it works very well.... as long as your drawings arent too large. once there are too many points, lines, components, etc. my computer starts to lag very badly. because of this i am looking to upgrade my graphics card. but it takes a pretty large file to make it start to lag

[lance.carocci]

@plrandel25 the 1660Ti is more than sufficient for driving the drawings canvas - Fusion 360 is more single-threaded CPU-bound than anything. Can you record your experience using Drawings? We might be able to identify specific logic slowing down the canvas (for example, I find that selection filtering can sometimes get overwhelmed if you give it too many objects to filter through.)

[atherisinnovations]

I am using a 1660 super on my current Fusion 360 computer (same card for almost 2 years) and I have had no graphical issues on this rig, and that is while using some large project files. But I don't do any animations so I can't comment on that aspect..

Some possibly relevant info on my system:

-DirectX runtime version 12.0

-NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super

-Driver version 516.40

-6144MB dedicated video memory

-Bus: PCI Express x16 Gen3

-Windows 10 21H1

-Intel Core i5-9400F processor

-32GB system RAM

[ddelikat]

You get your self Ryzen pro CPU with integrated GPU and you are good to go ! .