When working in CAD environments like SOLIDWORKS or 3DEXPERIENCE, you may see terms like CAD Families, Physical Products, and Representations. These concepts are connected, and understanding how they work together can help engineers, designers, and manufacturers manage their data more effectively.
3DEXPERIENCE World returns to Houston, Texas, February 1–4, 2026, at the George R. Brown Convention Center, offering keynotes, breakout sessions, hands-on learning, and networking with the global design and engineering community. Registration and the session catalog are now open, so attendees may begin planning their agendas. This guide highlights the most important reasons to attend, insider tips for a great conference, a look at speakers shaping the conversation, key agenda topics, and can't miss GoEngineer attractions.
These new products from Dell and NVIDIA provide SOLIDWORKS professionals with the necessary performance to tackle the next frontier of engineering design, offering practical guidance on selecting the right hardware and optimizing system setup for maximum output.
This guide covers the process for both a yearly SWOOD license reactivation and the reactivation after an upgrade to a newer version.
To get the best graphics performance out of your computer when running SOLIDWORKS, it’s important to configure your system’s graphics settings. By default, Windows often assigns SOLIDWORKS to use the power-saving Intel integrated graphics rather than the high-performance GPU (such as NVIDIA or AMD). This can cause slower performance, lag, or display glitches.
Revision control is a key reason companies adopt data management systems like PDM/PLM. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform makes it easy (sometimes too easy) to access older file revisions. A common question is, "How can I view only the latest revision without the clutter?" In this blog, we’ll explore three ways to filter search results and focus on the most current version.
Here is a rundown of some of the SOLIDWORKS 2026 enhancements in the area of collaboration and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Working with large assemblies can be challenging. Oftentimes, the only way to have the total context of a design is to open all the parts you don’t need to work on, just the parts you do need.
This article outlines how to add 3DEXPERIENCE platform information to a drawing title block, covering everything from property creation to saving the drawing template.
SOLIDWORKS Visualize supports native GPU acceleration on AMD hardware (RDNA™ 2 and newer) using the 3DS Stellar Fast rendering mode, Visualize’s interactive ray tracing engine based on Stellar RealtimeGI. Previously, if you used SOLIDWORKS Visualize on a computer with AMD GPUs, you had to use the AMD Radeon™ ProRender rendering engine. This change streamlines the user experience and reinforces native AMD hardware support.