“The Softdrive client is the major benefit for us as heavy GPU users. Other solutions present considerable lag under high GPU load.” - Matt, Arcadis Visualization Team
Spotlight
Arcadis was founded in 1888 in the Netherlands and stands as one of the world’s leading companies for delivering sustainable design, engineering, and consultancy services for natural and built assets. Headquartered in Amsterdam, the company operates in over 30 countries with a workforce of more than 36,000 professionals, including architects, engineers, and sustainability experts, and reported revenues of €5 billion in 2023. Arcadis works across every phase of asset creation and management for projects all around the world.
Challenge
In a highly competitive industry where speed, precision, and technological advantages are paramount, the Arcadis visualization team was shifting to a cloud based workstation to give them an edge. The problem was Arcadis struggled to find a solution that met their visualization benchmark requirements. Arcadis models represent some of the largest projects in the world, and therefore require the best and most powerful computing experience possible. When testing Azure Virtual Desktop, their tests failed to meet expectations. The tests included:
- Measuring real-world project loading and rendering times for all their software platforms.
- RESULT: Consistent crashing when trying to run heavy models.
- Obtaining user experience feedback while performing day to day tasks.
- RESULT: Refusal by the team to work with RDP
Fraught with issues and combined with high costs, the team was reconsidering their virtual desktop approach; however, that was until they tested Softdrive and Oracle’s solution.
Why Arcadis Chose Softdrive Over Azure
After exploring Azure as a potential solution but facing significant performance challenges and high costs, Softdrive + Oracle provided them an answer. Softdrive + Oracle focuses on delivering superior performance for the price, hitting on 5x better performance than RDP and 50% less than Azure. Conducting the same performance tests but with Softdrive, the Arcadis team said:
“The Softdrive client is the major benefit for us as heavy GPU users. Other solutions present considerable lag under high GPU load.”
Softdrive proved to be a major benefit for the Arcadis Visualization Team, delivering significant value that exceeded their demanding GPU requirements.
In an industry where precision, power, and reliability are paramount, Arcadis’ reliance on Softdrive is a testament to the software’s capability to meet the high demands of architectural and engineering projects. By enabling the Arcadis Visualization Team to run complex modelling and design software remotely, with unique specifications for each user; Softdrive supports the Arcadis commitment to scalable growth and innovation.
Use Case
The workload for the Arcadis Visualization Team includes running DDC (direct digital control) applications with high GPU requirements. This includes programs such as Revit for building information modeling, Lumion for real-time architectural visualization, and Twinmotion for immersive 3D visualization, among many others expanded on below. These tools are essential for the Arcadis Visualization Team’s operations in architecture, construction, and design projects. The Arcadis team is primarily based in Toronto, Canada; with team members distributed all across North America and in the UK. Almost all of the team is working remotely from their homes running highly graphically intensive software applications requiring their own unique specifications for each user.
Implementation
Softdrive was deployed to employees on the Arcadis Visualization Team, supporting a range of highly GPU-intensive applications and roles utilizing Softdrive’s most powerful configuration: SD4.
Performance Benefits
Softdrive provided significant performance benefits, enabling the Arcadis Visualization Team to run several demanding software applications smoothly and efficiently, which was not feasible with Azure.
The Arcadis Visualization Team championed Softdrive’s ability to prioritize framerate vs. quality and dial in the best settings that work for each end user's individual circumstances; enabling Arcadis to provide its users with a responsive experience regardless of where they are in the world.
Key benefits included:
- Adaptive performance that intelligently adjusts based on latency and bandwidth requirements (as low as 1 MBPS), ensuring optimal functionality for globally distributed teams.
- The ability to handle 4D applications like Lumion, Enscape, and Omniverse at 60 FPS.
- Providing the flexibility and customization for a tailored experience through advanced settings options (YUV 444, Visually Lossless, and prioritizing quality over framerate).
- Offering a scalable IT infrastructure that adapts to project demands, supporting configurations ranging from lightweight to high-performance setups as needed.
Software
The primary applications utilized by the Arcadis Visualization Team include (but are not limited to):
3dsmax: a professional 3D computer graphics program for making 3D animations, models, games and images.
VRay: a commercial plug-in for third-party 3D computer graphics software applications used for visualizations and computer graphics.
Lumion: a real-time 3D architectural visualization tool for architects.
Unreal Engine: a 3D computer graphics game engine.
TwinMotion: a real-time 3D immersion software that produces high-quality images, panoramas and standard or 360° VR videos in seconds.
Enscape: a commercial real-time rendering and virtual reality plugin.
Revit: a building information modeling software for architects, structural engineers, MEP engineers, designers, and contractors developed by Autodesk.
Omniverse: a modular development platform of APIs and microservices for building 3D applications and services powered by Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) and NVIDIA RTX.
Adobe Creative Cloud Suite: a set of applications and services from Adobe that gives subscribers access to a collection of software used for graphic design, video editing, web development, photography, along with a set of mobile applications and also some optional cloud services.
Adobe Substance: a 3D modeling software developed by Adobe Inc. It is part of the Substance 3D suite of tools designed for 3D digital content creation, specifically focusing on editing and sculpting 3D models.
StableDiffusion: a deep learning, text-to-image model primarily used to generate detailed images conditioned on text descriptions.
Conclusion
When the Arcadis Visualization Team approached Softdrive they had tried other VDI solutions, including Azure, but fell short of their internal standard visualization benchmark requirements. These benchmarks include quantitative indicators like real-world project loading and rendering times for the software deployed across their workforce, as well as qualitative indicators like subjective user experience feedback. Softdrive proved to be a major benefit for the Arcadis Visualization Team, providing their users with a responsive experience to meet their heavy GPU needs across a wide variety of graphically intensive software applications; for a globally distributed team with unique specification parameters. The Arcadis transition to Softdrive not only solved their initial technological challenges that others solutions like Azure failed to, but also supported their strategic goals of scalability and operational efficiency, while increasing cost savings. This partnership demonstrated the importance of a reliable cloud solution for a globally distributed, world class visualization team leveraging a wide variety of GPU intensive software applications utilized across models representing the largest projects in the world.
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