NVIDIA Showcases AI Capabilities at PTC Global Summit

At the PTC Global Summit in New Orleans at the end of January, attendees were able to take advantage of sessions covering the latest updates and features of the full suite of PTC design, service, and PLM tools. There were also presentations from leading end users.

NVIDIA and Dell Technologies were also on hand to host a session titled “Optimizing Hardware Choices Across Different Applications and Stages of the Product Lifecycle,” that included hardware configuration tips for CAD/CAE/CAM, augmented/virtual reality, digital twins and more, and the significance of high-performance professional workstations for CAD and PLM software. The session also included an overview of AI (artificial intelligence) workstations and the role  of  NVIDIA RTX professional GPUs  in these workflows.

During the NVIDIA presentation, Pietro Fabiani, senior business development manager at NVIDIA, provided an overview of the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPU architecture. The Ada Lovelace architecture is designed to improve productivity and accelerate graphics, AI, rendering, and compute workloads.  

The Ada Lovelace-based GPUs offer new streaming multiprocessors (CUDA cores) that provide up to 90 TFLOPS of single precision compute (FP32) performance, to accelerate graphics and compute up to 2X the previous generation. ​Third-generation RT cores provide up to 2X faster ray-triangle intersection than the previous generation. Fourth-generation tensor cores provide more than 2X the performance of the previous generation and support the new FP8 data format that reduces data storage and improves performance.  

According to Fabiani, a key differentiator of NVIDIA RTX GPUs is that they are purpose built for professional workloads, and they are optimized across a variety of design and visualization workflows such as simulation, rendering, editing, and computer aided design, and offer ISV software certifications.

​According to Fabiani, “In the manufacturing industry, NVIDIA RTX has been paramount to accelerating time to market for new products, making real-time photorealistic design and simulation possible to confidently build, visualize, and test concepts before going to production.​ And these benefits extend to the [architecture, engineering and construction] AEC industry as well, giving designers the ability to accurately visualize every aspect of individual rooms, huge buildings, or even massive cityscapes before committing to construction.”

Fabiani added: “Particleworks already empowers [PTC] Creo users with a GPU-accelerated solver, Simerics is in the process of rebuilding their core engine to run on GPU for the most complex simulations, and Ansys' integration providing real-time simulation during the design phase has been a total game changer, according to Creo users who stopped by our booth.” 

Image courtesy of NVIDIA.

RTX GPUs also bring AI capabilities to all of these industries, as well as advancing critical scientific research – accelerating deep learning and machine learning use cases ranging all the way from medical imaging to heliophysics, Fabiani said. ​

During the presentation, he explained that NVIDIA partner ISVs are integrating AI into their engineering applications, and that generative AI will drive new features and functionality. 

Workstations can offer multi-user inference for smaller AI models thanks to the capabilities of the GPU. The presentation also provided examples of how a professional workstation can be used for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which enables additional data beyond the AI model’s original training to be used to provide better output from the model ​

Fabiani also discussed the NVIDIA Inference Microservice (NIM), which he described as “the fastest, easiest, and most portable way of putting Generative AI models in production in five minutes or less.​” (For more information on NIM and other NVIDIA AI efforts, see our CES 2025 coverage here.)

Ken Flannigan, Director of AEC Alliances and Solutions at Dell Technologies, provided information on the company’s recent Performance PC rebranding (you can read more about that here), as well as the company’s end-to-end AI solutions powered by NVIDIA RTX GPUs. The Dell Pro Max AI PCs include a range of NVIDIA GPUs for graphics and parallel processing, as well as Intel neural processing units (NPUs) specifically for AI tasks. 

Fabiani noted that AI workstations can run local large language models (LLMs), small language models (SLMs), diffusion models and more, and support NVIDIA AI Enterprise to facilitate generative AI development and deployment.

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