AMD FireGL™ Helps Ohio State University’s “Buckeye Bullet" Set World Speed Record 

Buckeye Bullet Exceeds 300 mph

In October, 2004, the Buckeye Bullet, Ohio State University’s electric land speed vehicle, became the first electric car to officially exceed 300mph, setting both the national and world speed records. The Bullet, designed, built and maintained by the undergraduate and graduate students at Ohio State University established a new national speed record with top speed of 315 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, beating its own national record of 257 mph.

In order to achieve optimal aerodynamic results, Stevens and her team are using the most sophisticated graphics software in the industry to design the body of the Bullet II. The select cadre of student engineers responsible for the body design and shape of the car are using CATIA and SolidWorks software applications. And to get the best graphics results when running CAD software, they turned to AMD FireGL workstation graphics accelerators. “We have seen a drastic improvement in performance of our existing software design since installing the AMD FireGL graphics cards,” stated Stevens. “It is great to see such performance enhancements by just changing the graphics cards that we use.”