1.3. Requirements for the GPU Accelerator in Mechanical APDL

Your system must meet the following requirements to use the GPU accelerator capability in Mechanical APDL. For information on the most recently tested GPU cards, see the GPU Accelerator Capabilities PDF on the Platform Support section of the Ansys Website.

  • The machine(s) being used for the simulation must contain at least one GPU card.

  • A minimum 16GB of on-card memory is recommended in order to achieve meaningful acceleration in simulations that can use the GPU card.

  • To achieve optimal performance, only GPU cards with significant double precision performance (FP64) are recommended for use with the sparse direct solver and eigensolvers based on the sparse solver (for example, Block Lanczos or subspace). The following cards are recommended:

     Recommended Solvers
    CardRelease YearSparse (Direct)Iterative (PCG, etc.)
    AMD Instinct MI300X2023YY
    AMD Instinct MI2102022YY
    AMD Instinct MI250, 250X2021YY
    NVIDIA H1002022YY
    NVIDIA A302021YY
    NVIDIA A1002020YY
    NVIDIA Quadro GV1002018YY
    NVIDIA Tesla Series V1002017YY
     
    NVIDIA RTX 5000 Ada2023NY
    NVIDIA L402022NY
    NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada2022NY
    NVIDIA RTX A55002022NY
    NVIDIA A16, A102021NY
    NVIDIA RTX A5000, A4500, A40002021NY
    NVIDIA RTX A60002020NY
    NVIDIA A402020NY

  • For NVIDIA GPU cards, the driver version must be 525.60.13 or newer.

  • For AMD GPU cards, the following AMD link lists their supported operating systems (OS).

    To install the AMD driver, you must perform the three-step procedure summarized below and described in detail with specific Linux commands for different operating systems on the AMD page: How to Install ROCm (amd.com).

    1. Download the "amdgpu-install" script to your system using the appropriate commands for your operating system. Note that the version of amdgpu-install must come from the ROCm 5.7.0 page, and you only need to download the installer script (the full ROCm package is not needed).

    2. Install the "kernel-mode driver" with the following command

      sudo amdgpu-install --usecase=dkms

    3. Install the “libdrm-amdgpu” library to your operating system using the appropriate commands.

    If you have issues setting up the AMD GPU driver, see Error Code 101 (hipInvalidDevice) for AMD GPU devices in the Parallel Processing Guide.

  • To utilize a GPU device that is not on the recommended list of cards, set the following environment variable:

    ANSGPU_OVERRIDE=1

    This is most beneficial when you wish to run on newer GPUs that were not available at the time of release of this version of the Ansys program. If you choose to use this environment variable, you should ensure that the GPU device that you wish to use is sufficiently powerful, in terms of both double-precision compute power and on-card memory, to achieve meaningful acceleration for your simulation. Using this environment variable with an underpowered CPU may actually decelerate your simulation.