Design firms live between two bad options. The first: buy every designer an expensive workstation with a professional graphics card that becomes outdated after three years, and still falls short when you win a big project. The second: save money and let people work on weaker hardware while a Revit model takes five minutes to open and a rendering runs all night.
Remote work adds to this. An architect working from home on a laptop cannot open a BIM model of several gigabytes, and copying it to a personal computer is ruled out by both common sense and the client’s contract.
A third option, a graphics processor in the cloud, is still little known, even though it solves both problems at once. In this article we explain how it works, who it suits and when a workstation is still worth buying.
Who actually needs a GPU
Not every engineering task requires a graphics card. Text documents, cost estimates and project management run anywhere. A GPU is needed where three-dimensional geometry is calculated on screen in real time or large video streams are processed:
- BIM design (Revit, Archicad, Tekla): large models with thousands of elements, coordination across several disciplines.
- CAD and mechanical design (AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Inventor): assemblies with hundreds of parts, simulations.
- 3D visualisation and rendering (3ds Max, Blender, Lumion, Twinmotion): every second of calculation is GPU work.
- Video editing and colour grading (Premiere, DaVinci Resolve): 4K footage without a GPU is not work, it is waiting.
- GIS and point clouds from laser scanning.
For these tasks it is not only GPU power that matters but also that the application runs with certified driver sets. This is exactly where gaming and professional graphics cards differ.
How NVIDIA vGPU in the cloud works
In the data centre there is a server with professional NVIDIA graphics cards. NVIDIA vGPU technology lets you split one physical card into several virtual ones, each with its own guaranteed video memory, and assign them to separate virtual desktops. The designer gets a virtual workstation with Windows, their own applications and a real, not emulated, graphics card.
It is accessed through a remote desktop protocol built specifically for graphics: only a compressed picture of the screen travels to the computer on the designer’s desk, and mouse and keyboard movements travel back. The model, the textures and the entire computing load stay in the data centre. This means that:
- The workplace can be any computer with a good internet connection, including a laptop or a thin client.
- The designer works from the office, home or a construction site with the same desktop and the same applications left open.
- Several people work on the same files at local network speed, because the file server and the workstations sit in the same data centre.
Our GPU Cloud servers work exactly like this: virtual workstations with NVIDIA vGPU, selected according to your applications’ requirements, managed and protected like any other managed server.
Data stays in the data centre: not only convenient but secure
For design firms, data is the main asset, and its security is often a condition of the client’s contract. When workstations are physical, a model exists in ten copies: on office computers, laptops, USB drives and home computers. Nobody backs those up, and when a laptop is lost, the drawings are lost with it.
Virtual workstations eliminate this problem at its root. Files never leave the data centre, even when a person works from home. Backups are made centrally, and the computer on the desk is only a screen: it can be lost, broken or replaced without losing data. Access is protected with a VPN and two-factor authentication, sign-ins are logged, and this is a direct answer to the questions asked by clients’ security audits or ISO 27001 requirements.
When an employee leaves the company, access is disabled in a minute and all projects stay in place. With a physical workstation, it means getting the computer back and hoping nobody made copies.
Project-based demand: pay for what you need this month
In the design business, workload is not constant. During a tender you need three visualisers, afterward one. A big project won brings five new BIM designers for six months. Buying physical workstations in this situation is a gamble: you buy either too many or too few.
In the cloud, a virtual workstation can be created within hours and shut down when the project is over. You can temporarily increase video memory for a single rendering job and return it afterward. You can give a subcontractor a workstation with access to one project only and switch it off when the contract ends, without any data transfer.
Another aspect that is often forgotten is hardware ageing. A professional graphics card ages faster than the rest of the workstation, and software requirements grow every year. In the cloud, hardware refresh is the provider’s concern, and one morning the designer simply gets a faster workstation.
When buying a workstation still makes sense
It would be dishonest to say the cloud suits everyone. There are cases where a physical workstation is the better choice:
- Unstable or slow internet. A remote graphics desktop needs a stable connection with low latency. If the connection in your office keeps dropping, fix that first.
- Work with specialised peripherals: pressure-sensitive digital tablets, calibrated monitors for colour grading, VR headsets. Some of these work over a remote desktop, but not all of them and not always perfectly.
- One person, steady work, no project fluctuations. If you have a single visualiser who does the same work every day and never travels, a workstation can be simpler.
- Applications whose licences are tied to physical hardware and whose vendor does not allow virtualisation. This is increasingly rare but still happens.
Often the best answer is a mix: physical workstations for core staff in the office, virtual ones for project-based staff, remote workers and subcontractors. Both can work with the same files if the file server is in the cloud.
What to look for when choosing a provider
A cloud GPU is not a simple VPS with a card attached. Ask: which NVIDIA vGPU profiles are offered and how much video memory is guaranteed for each workstation, whether the drivers are certified for your applications, what the latency is from your office to the data centre, where data is physically stored and how backups are made, and whether workstation management and protection are included. A data centre in the same country as your office is a practical argument here, not a patriotic one: latency from any city to a domestic data centre is a few milliseconds, and to a foreign region it is tens.
Where to start
- List which employees actually use GPU-dependent applications and how many of them work remotely or on a project basis.
- Measure the stability and latency of your internet connection from the office and from the most common remote locations.
- Pick one designer for a trial period: two weeks with a real project shows more than any presentation.
- Plan where the file server will live: if workstations are in the cloud, the files must be right next to them.
- Talk to us about GPU Cloud servers. We will help choose a vGPU profile for your applications, and VPN network management will ensure secure access from anywhere.
