Autodesk VRED on Azure

Machine designers around the world can now use their time more efficiently. Specifically, Autodesk VRED users can spend less time on mundane tasks like rendering and more time doing high-end design work.

At Microsoft Azure, we are delighted to announce that Autodesk VRED is now available on Azure and customers can now take advantage of our latest generation of virtual machines (VMs) to develop high-end prototypes and visualizations in a variety of scenarios.

Designers using high-end design applications face several challenges in current on-premises environments:

• Lack of availability of GPUs in an unpredictable supply environment
• Significant time lost in rendering workflows
• Low support for high-end design techniques like Ray Tracing

VRED on Azure customers can get access to high-end GPUs via NCasT4VMs in multiple regions around the world instantly. These VMs feature up to 4 NVIDIA T4 GPUs with 16 GB of memory each, up to 64 non-multithreaded AMD EPYC 7V12 (Rome) processor cores (base frequency of 2.45 GHz, all-cores peak frequency of 3.1 GHz and single-core peak frequency of 3.3 GHz) and 440 GiB of system memory.

We tested VRED ray tracing using CPU and GPU configurations – and saw a performance improvement of more than 40% when using 3 GPUs, and 80% when using 4 GPUs.

NOTE: When using CPUs only we used all 64 cores

“The combination of Autodesk VRED and Microsoft Azure give users around the globe the flexibility to scale their capacities on demand, compute highly complex scenarios and stream to any device. This is an important step towards democratizing visualization and allowing anybody to collaborate visually, prototype digitally and make confident and educated decisions from anywhere at any time”

• Marek Trawny, Director of Product Management, Automotive and Concept Design at Autodesk

“We are excited to be a part of AUTODESK VRED’s cloud journey. Using the solution on Microsoft Azure, designers are empowered to experience all variants of their styling concepts thereby fostering innovation while reducing time to market. By enabling this capability on Azure, Autodesk will deliver enhanced operational agility at scale for our customers.”

• Kurt Niebuhr, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Corp.

About AUTODESK VRED

Autodesk VRED is a 3D visualization and virtual prototyping software for automotive designers. In addition to solutions specific to the automotive industry, it also offers the designer an easy-to-use infrastructure for virtual reality applications, so you can visualize models prepared in different CAD software within the software and also have the chance to examine them with virtual reality solutions.

VRED 3D visualization software helps designers and engineers create product presentations, design reviews, and virtual prototypes using interactive GPU raytracing and both analytic and cloud-rendering modes.