Revit Graphics Certification

With advanced graphics available within Revit, the development team is often asked how Revit graphics hardware certification works, and how graphics card manufacturers participate.

Any candidate graphics cards have to meet the minimum requirements of supporting DirectX 11 and Shader Model 3. Any graphics card that does not meet these requirements will not properly display Revit graphics.

For example, some lines (particularly hidden lines) will be missing from models, reducing the reliability of derived drawings created on that computer. If the target computer has a graphics card that does not meet these requirements we recommend turning off hardware acceleration (HA). When HA is disabled, Revit uses Microsoft’s graphics emulation (WARP) instead of the graphics card to produce accurate graphics, at the cost of performance reduction.

Even if a graphics card supports the above requirements, sometimes graphics drivers have bugs that result in incomplete compliance, causing incorrect graphics to be displayed in Revit. If you are experiencing problems with the display of Revit models we suggest trying a more recent graphics driver as the issue may have already been fixed by the manufacturer. Over the years we have identified a number of issues that have been reported by our customers and we have included them in a test suite that can be used to verify the functionality of a graphics card driver.

To test different graphics cards and drivers, the Revit team creates an application containing the test suite and makes the application available to graphics hardware manufacturers like NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. The manufacturers can then run this application on their graphics card and driver combinations to generate test results. If the results show any issues, the manufacturer can make immediate changes to the drivers and test and repeat until no issues remain.

Once the test results of a card and driver are acceptable, the results are sent back to the Revit team for validation. If we find no anomalies the results are posted to the Autodesk Certified Hardware site.

Comments

[Alex Tonnetti]

hi
i installed a student version of revit 2015 on an asus, republic of gamers 501, with windows 8, and cpu core i7, and nvidia geforce gtx 960m.
the installation went finely, but i cannot use it since it has some part flickering, and it freezes. so i wonder if there is any problem of compatibility, as for example with graphics or OS. Please let us know as soon as possible. We chose this asus since it seemed to be compatible with the requirements to use revit, or exceeded those requirements. When trying to contact any customer services unfortunately nobody has been able to offer any help so far.
If you can please advice. Best regards. Alex Tonnetti

[Sasha Crotty]

Hi Alex,

We usually do not recommend using gaming-geared graphics cards because they are not optimized to function with Revit by the manufacturer. The GEForce card may very well be causing issues. Have you tried turning of Hardware Acceleration (R -> Options -> Graphics -> Use Hardware Acceleration) to see if that resolves your issues?

Thanks,
Sasha

[Lloyd]

I have exactly the same problem.
So it seems that this is a software limitation. It would be great if autodesk can make revit work with gaming video cards.

[Sasha Crotty]

Hi Lloyd,

There's actually nothing that the Revit team can do to change this behavior. Revit uses only officially published DirectX 11 APIs. The changes would have to be made to the graphics card driver by the graphics card manufacturer.

Thanks,
Sasha

[Jim]

There doesn't appear to be any approved graphics cards for Building Design Suites since the 2014 version. Has this facility been shut down?

[Steve Bennett]

How often does this process happen between Autodesk and GPU makers? Every major release? Every service pack? Are past versions of Revit continually evaluated as new cards are released or as new drivers are released?

[Sasha Crotty]

Hi Steve,
Certification can happen at any point during the year. The hardware certification website is updated monthly if new results are available. The certification file included with Revit installation is also updated with each service pack.
Thanks,
Sasha

[Sasha Crotty]

Hi Jim,
You are correct, certifications for Building Design Suites are no longer being issued. This is due to differences between certification processes and needs for different products included in the suite.
Thanks,
Sasha

[Eric Schappe]

Sasha,
What would be the recommended path for those of us who have the Building Design Suites for purchasing new graphics cards? We have a variety of people using a variety of applications from the Suite and only a few "standard" models of graphics cards which we are trying to use. Should we base our graphics card purchasing decisions off the application we use the most?