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User Comment: Opening Up CAD Standards. Cool or Not Cool?

Published
by
Josh
on September 30, 2008
in Tech to watch
. Tags: , , .

Hello! if you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the SolidSmack RSS feed or to the free email updates. Thanks for visiting!

Each week, I’m going to start posting a comment from one of you wonderful readers that take the time to comment in the posts. I see a lot of discussion being missed, and that is just sad, don’t ya think? Here’s the first one.

In a previous article on OpenGL and Direct3D, a commenter named Mike made a really good point about the open source state of CAD and API standards. I agree with him, but there’s a lot more to it than software being tied to an OS and getting it all for free. Think of what companies like Google are doing.

Do we need open standard for 3D CAD?
Here’s what Mike thinks. What’s your opinion?

While I don’t doubt the validity the argument for Direct3D (who can’t argue that money talks). This is strangely contrary to industry moment at the moment towards open source and portable solutions nearly universally.

Portable platform independent standards are coming about in nearly all other sectors of software allowing users to store information in the ‘cloud’ and developers to create platform independent web and desktop apps allowing users to take their information anywhere on anything they want.

Strangely enough CAD and 3D modeling developers have become the lame duck; following at a very protracted pace to the rest of the industry to embrace open standards (we still don’t have an open source answer for DWG; which Autodesk controls ruthlessly).

Honestly I view this as very bad for the industry as a whole. As users continue to switch in droves to alternative Operating Systems (Mac OSX, Linux, even a few UNIX) and methods of communication and work (smart phones, light laptops without the horsepower to run many things) fleeing the junk that is Vista, and Windows Mobile they will increasingly demand open standards so that they can access their own information anywhere and on anything.

To illustrate the point, PC World (perhaps the most widely accepted ‘geek’ magazine by non-geeks) had an article this month about switching to Linux for small business to avoid the Vista and the ever increasing fees associated with Microsoft per-seat licensing for servers.

As pointed out several places Direct3D is mainly used on computer games, for which there has been a declining demand on the actual PC. Portable (Nintendo DS) and console (Wii, PS3, XBox) games tend to, and have been, the path to big money in gaming for a long time. Much of the software development for these systems and for Direct 3D and OpenGL has been to support advanced quick-render, shader, and VR developments. While this does benefit CAD rendering with more realistic and quick rendering it does not focus on primary ‘primitive’ object modeling and parametric approaches rapidly gaining steam in the industry. Workstation graphics cards are tuned in this regard and call for a more expensive workstations
as it is; despite using Direct 3D or OpenGL.

Any way you slice it it seems that the CAD industry is just needs to pull their heads out of their own rear-ends and see what is happening all around.

I’m in support of OpenGL but it would be equally beneficial if Microsoft just opened up it’s Direct 3D and Direct X implementations.
Originally posted as a comment by Mike on SolidSmack using Disqus.

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Viewing 7 Comments

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    Josh,

    Mike made this statement...

    "Workstation graphics cards are tuned in this regard and call for a more expensive workstations
    as it is; despite using Direct 3D or OpenGL."

    but in your post where you bolded the AutoDesk's employee quote, it was this...

    "where OpenGL graphics drivers actually disable some OpenGL functionality on consumer, game, laptop, and chipset HW so you are forced to purchase the more expensive workstation graphics HW, just so your OpenGL graphics works correctly."

    Who is correct here, Mike or the AutoDesk employee? I tend to think the AutoDesk employee is correct here about the "workstation" cards. Mike seems to imply that the price increase for the workstation is justified because they are "tuned". Poppycock, I say. The tuning does not explain why the workstation cards range from $200-$3,000. Do they tune more for the $3,000 workstation card? I think not. Is the hardware that much more expensive for the $3,000 workstation card - nope, not when you compare it to what you get with the top of the line gaming card hardware-wise. They charge that much because what else are you going to use, plain and simple. The argument that OpenGL is open - its crap. Its locking us into hardware that is too pricey for what we are getting. Thats not open at all. I would argue that neither OpenGL or Direct3D is truly "open". Its pick your poison...

    With regards to having more exposure to more OS's.... I can understand that OpenGL could have that mark in its favor. But, come on - are people really migrating in droves to MAC or Linux or Unix so they can use SolidWorks there? Are people really clamoring for 3D CAD files on their I Phones? I would find someone at AutoDesk and ask them these same questions. I wouldn't think they would make such a huge change to their product without having thought about these matters. I'd like to see what they have to say.

    I would like to know what is Mike's last name and where or who does he work for.
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    you said it man, "They charge that much because what else are you going to use, plain and simple"

    I think he's making the observations that a lot of money is spent on a workstation despite an OpenGL or Direct3D GPU is being used.

    What people want with hardware/software are really the same as really intuitive design. "Don't Make me Think." Don't make me pay and have to figure out the right set of options so something doesn't suck. whoever figures this out, has a corner on the market.
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    While I don't think people are migrating to alternative OSs in droves there is a noticeable uptick in market share for these systems.

    Personally I prefer Macs. I'd ditch Windows entirely if SolidWorks was native on OS X.
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    According to this interview at Ars Technica (linked below), graphics API's may not be around too much longer. Perhaps SW is anticipating this and staying with OpenGL instead of investing in a conversion to another graphics API that is just going to die anyway.

    http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/gpu-swee...
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    I'm a very big fan of Blender it is a opensource 3D moddeling program that is operating on every platform. It is made completly independed of an operating platform. So if they can do it so can autodesk or dassault. But I said some time ago that solidworks should be on linux some guy laught at me and said they where like microsoft pets. So it is not the technology but the people that make money of you.
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    I've played with Blender on and off for the last five years, but I keep going back to SW for all my design tasks. Why? Because Blender is great for modeling. Period. It has no analysis tools, no CAD tools, no way to mate models together, etc.

    I agree that Dassault has become one of Microsoft's pets. They had the chance to keep CATIA V5 on UNIX, but decided to switch to Windows. Even their current V5 UNIX installs run the Windows code in emulation. V6 looks like it's tied even tighter to Windows.
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    I do object to paying over the odds for so called workstation graphics cards and it is interesting to note that a lot of the more niche applications in CGI like Cinema 4D don't recommend Quadros for example - stating that there are no performance advantages. I also recall from my days as a Think3 user speaking to one of the developers and them saying (this was 7 years ago) Think3 software was not optimised for workstation graphics anyway so a standard games spec card is fine.

    And that is the issue. Regardless of the OpenGL or Direct 3D/X status it is down to the developers to write the applications to utilise whatever system they use. SolidWorks for example uses a lot of Nvidia technology, so you can be sure NVidia make certain that that technology is available ONLY in the quadros (hacks aside).

    So who are the villains here? Microsoft? The CAD vendors? No I think the real villains are the card manufacturers who know damn well the hardware is pretty standard and what you are paying for is the driver software which, at the end of the day, needs to be tested in the chosen application by the CAD vendor.

    The future? Well I think it will go round full circle. I once owned (still have it) an SGI Visual workstation which had a state of the art OpenGL based graphics system. The processing hardware and graphics systems were all integrated and shared RAM so it was tweakable to the nth degree (should you want to). That system had realtime rendering in 1999. These machines were expensive and they were phased out as the use of standard components took hold. Now with multi cores processing a lot of the graphics grunting can be off loaded to the main CPUs and system RAM - with no graphics performance hit.
 

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