Messages

1

General / Re: Scan inside and outside a house?

« on: November 16, 2023, 11:30:21 AM »

For interiors it is good to have good camera, where you can safely increase ISO to 800-1600 if you do not want to use tripod...so full frame DSLR ~18-20Mpix... more Mpix will cause more noise.
You can put some markers on walls which are painted with just color and have no other features.
Cover glass panels/mirrors.
If you can keep the doors open, it helps you grab more feature points on photos from rooms you see through the open doors.
Interiors are overall harder to shoot because not so much space, plenty of furniture, not good lighting etc.

2

General / Re: Managing huge project : HELP !

« on: November 16, 2023, 11:11:13 AM »

If Metashape does not have build-in feature to resume work after crash/power off then you can't.
With that suspend to disk function you can at least eliminate problem caused by not using ECC memory modules...put PC to sleep mode for few minutes after each ~18-24h of work.

Can you manually split project on smaller pieces and then merge dense pointclouds together?

3

General / Re: Metashape Pro Crashing During Image Alignment

« on: November 16, 2023, 11:03:41 AM »

@colbyrand  Check also your NVMe SSDs at least with some SMART monitoring tools if there are no errors reported or warnings. SSDs are also just memory modules. There could be problem when Metashape is saving temporary files during estimating camera locations phase....you never know.

4

General / Re: Managing huge project : HELP !

« on: November 15, 2023, 01:15:56 PM »

To avoid crashes your mac should use memory modules with ECC(Error correction code), because without this after few days some error could appear in RAM modules.
If you do not have option to use ECC memory modules and want to avoid power outages(storms) you can once per day or before incomming storm put your mac into sleep mode(suspend RAM content to disk).
In this case all RAM content is saved to disk and PC is completely power OFF.
After turning it back ON, RAM content is loaded from disk and your work will continue automatically where you left it.
There are two options, suspend to RAM and suspend to disk. They can be set in computer BIOS.

5

General / Re: Strange test results on different GPU

« on: October 19, 2023, 11:12:36 AM »

@DayGeckoArt
It is mostly FP and thanks to double FP units since RTX 3000, RTX 4060 could achieves the same performance as 2080 ti. It has slightly higher single precision performance, but much weaker memory bandwidth(272 vs. 616)...so if L2 cache does not help, it could be even slower...worth to test  .

6

General / Re: Aligning photos I9 cpu used only at 10-15%

« on: October 17, 2023, 09:27:55 PM »

Hi Dukytony, matching points stage is accelerated by GPU, so CPU usage is OK in your case.

7

General / Re: How to tell if the GPU is being used

« on: October 17, 2023, 09:25:53 PM »

@HMArnold
On matching points phase you should see great GPU utilization, but it depends on settings(key points limit and if you are using generic preselection).
Extracting points is greatly used by GPU, but the problem is, decoding image data is single threaded on CPU side, so not enough data even for weak GPU 
For monitoring you can use small GPU-Z utility(GPU Load column).

8

General / Re: Help Computer Specs upgrading

« on: July 31, 2023, 02:31:56 PM »

Mac Studio has advantage only on CPU tasks...thanks to almost 4x higher memory bandwidth. But if custom PC has more CPU cores, the Mac advantage is gone.
Custom PC build will always better fits your needs at the same amount of money.

Can you post detailed metashape alignment settings? And how big your photos are and what kind of project it is?

9

General / Re: Laptop recommendations

« on: July 31, 2023, 09:46:41 AM »

Dell G 16 7630 Ram is not expandable to 64 gb, because max. module size is 16GB, so 2x16GB max.

Dell G 16 7630 i9 is probably the best choice, because the CPU has 8 performance cores and 16 efficient cores(i7 model 6P and 8E cores). RTX4070 has +50% more CUDA cores over RTX4060.
If you need 64GB RAM, then Dell XPS 15 or Dell Alienware m16...it just depends on whether you prefer more CPU or GPU performance.

These notebooks are also better than Mackbooks, because RTX GPUs has dedicated memory with higher memory bandwidth(256GB/s vs max. 200GB/s on M2 Pro), higher raw TFLOPs performance, so all GPU task will be faster in Metashape.
If we compare CPU side, M2 pro has higher memory bandwidth for CPU(200GB/s vs. ~55-70GB on Intel CPU with DDR5), but in terms of core counts, Intel has a lot more E-cores so it seems to also wins in this area.

10

General / Re: Help Computer Specs upgrading

« on: July 28, 2023, 11:08:01 AM »

Hi AIRWORKS,

what is definitely worth to keep is:
1. PSU which has enough power even for two modern GPU(RTX 4080/4090) and modern 16 cores 32 threads CPU(ryzen 7950x).
2. cooling solution
3. case
4. Samsung 970EVO

The rest of components are simply old now with weak performance.
Modern AMD ryzen 7950X is ~3x faster than your i9-7900x in multicore tasks and it is able to cunsume less power.
Single modern GPUs are also much faster in single precision tasks(RTX3080ti ~3x, RTX4070ti ~3-3.5x, RTX4080 ~4x+).
RAM memory - you would be able to use it on some motherboards with new processors, but DDR4 is already on the decline, so limited options.

It would be also worth to monitor CPU/GPU utilization and RAM memory allocation during processing on smaller task(e.g. under 1000 photos) to better understand how Metashape is utilizing hardware during each subtask and then it will be easier make decision what component are more important for your projects and workflow.

11

General / Re: Managing huge project : HELP !

« on: July 18, 2023, 10:25:29 PM »

Oh, I remember, we were talking about the disk disconnection 
In that case server and nodes should work, because there are disks constantly running or they can be easily awakened.
If you have just 8Mpix photos, then metashape settings are not so important. 8Mpix are small photos even for highest quality.

12

General / Re: Managing huge project : HELP !

« on: July 13, 2023, 10:50:13 AM »

Hi Jacques,

it would be useful if you share with us more details about your project and more details from log when the issue happened.
size of photos in Mpix?, ground or drone photogrammetry?, metashape error messages, system RAM utilization in the moment when it crashed,...metashape settings, ... etc. simply a lot more of info for us 

13

General / Re: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D vs Intel Core i9-13900K ?

« on: July 12, 2023, 11:15:12 AM »

I have read the scientific article and checked their methods and graphs and this is my observation:

1. They tested GPU, not CPU.
There are almost no OS freezes, because graphics driver is restarted and recovered in case of GPU computation errors caused by low voltage.
In case of CPU computation errors, you may notice immediatelly blue screen/system restart, because CPU is managing whole system.

2. They choice GTX 980 which has 1126MHz base and 1216MHz boost frequency. That is how are set from Nvidia. Each Nvidia's partner is setting the boost frequencies even higher. In the article they started to check errors from core frequency 1404MHz up to 1806 which is considered as pretty high overclocking on default cooling solution.
You can clearly see(graphs figure 3 and 4), that if you do ~7.44% reduction of voltage(nice decrease of power consumption) for max. boost frequency 1404MHz(set by partner) there are no errors on this scientific level of measurement. It is sad, they did not publish exact volatage values.
The higher you go with frequency the lower posibilities are to undervolt, because for these frequencies the voltage/frequency in GPU's bios is not set. That scientific undervolting test doest not have much sense for overclocked frequencies.

What I am advising to cyrilp is easy and safe way where this scientific testing methods are not needed and the OS freezing test plus small voltage reserve after finding correct voltage for CPU is 100% enough for stable system with correct calculations. Otherwise as I said, I would be noticing constantly errors and bad strange results on everything I am doing on my PC with undervolted CPUs and GPUs almost 15 years.

My advised CPU undervolting knowledge are not falsehood.

The RAM errors caused by electromagnetic radiation are common, when users put their notebooks to sleep state over night(RAM modules still under voltage) instead of power off state. After two or more days strange things happens.

14

General / Re: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D vs Intel Core i9-13900K ?

« on: July 11, 2023, 11:47:33 AM »

All of my CPUs were always undervolted and I never had problems with calculation errors even during  several hours of computing.

It is several times higher probabilty of errors in the system RAM modules affected with cosmic and electromagnetic radiation after several hours if modules don't have ECC correction. In that case money saved on CPU cooling can be used to buy RAM modules with ECC correction, like server computers have. Ryzen CPUs support this feature.

In case of exaggerated concerns and be 1000% sure, you can always leave a slightly higher voltage value than it is necessary for the proper operation of the processor. But it is still huge difference and big save in energy and heat compared to what we get from the factory with default settings. Manufacturers are keeping huge reserve because there is no time to test all chips to exact voltage needs.

Chips used in smartphones have much much less reserves in voltages compared to desktop CPUs, and are working several days without errors.

15

General / Re: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D vs Intel Core i9-13900K ?

« on: July 11, 2023, 09:52:14 AM »

Undervolting is safe procedure, because it is about to find the lowest voltage which is not causing freezing and not the first one which causes issues. It is also adviced keep 0.02V reserve after finding the right voltage value.

Using ECO mode only helps to decrease power consumption and temperatures, but it also masivelly decrease performance because it is not based on undervolting principles.
https://youtu.be/RlMq1VEWNIM?t=84   that cinenebch is good representation how multicore performance dropped after eco mode enable.

What is even better is lock multicore frequencies to certain fixed value, e.g. 4.4/4.6/4.8GHz and do not use automatic boost single core frequencies...this makes undervolting much easier and more effective.

Finding the lowest voltage for CPU is much easier in ryzen master app then adjusting values in BIOS and restarting computer after each change. So it is 100% worth to do, otherwise we are significantly overpaying the performance. With undervolting we can also save money because much expensive water cooling solutions is not needed.