Messages

46

General / Re: Disappointing performance results on new MacBook Pro M1 Max

« on: November 03, 2021, 04:27:14 PM »

Yeah, that's what I saw too.  Alignment and Meshing get about a 2x speed improvement for me, but Depth Map Generation considerably less.  Overall improvement of 20% for processing an entire Chunk from beginning to end.

47

General / Re: Disappointing performance results on new MacBook Pro M1 Max

« on: November 02, 2021, 06:21:30 PM »

Thanks for clarifying.   So, based on all my short test results I have concluded that Metashape is about 20% faster overall on the new MacBook Pro M1 Max with 32 cores compared with the old 2013 Mac Pro.  It's a significant improvement, but not the 5x improvement I was hoping for.

The best part, however, is that it seems more stable.  Depth Map generation would occasionally freeze up my Mac Pro, but I haven't had a single issue on the new M1 Max.

-Brian

48

General / Re: Disappointing performance results on new MacBook Pro M1 Max

« on: November 02, 2021, 04:10:36 PM »

Pardon my ignorance, but I never see "in concurrent" in my log I only see this:

2021-11-01 20:24:31 Using device: Apple M1 Max, 32 compute units, 43690 MB global memory, OpenCL 1.2

What does that mean exactly?  That it's only using the GPU for one task at a time, so not in parallel?  Do my 32 GPU cores matter?

Thanks,

-Brian

49

General / Re: Disappointing performance results on new MacBook Pro M1 Max

« on: November 02, 2021, 03:35:04 PM »

Herein lies my confusion about GPU's vs. Cores.  I don't know how OpenCL works, so I don't know what Metashape is doing under the hood.  All I know is what I see in the console log. 

When I run Metashape on the old Mac Pro the Log shows GPU1 and GPU2 running in parallel, so I know it's simultaneously processing at least 2 GPU threads.  But on the new MacBook it just shows GPU1 in the log, so I have no idea what it's actually doing.  Is it using all 32 cores on that one GPU, so it's running 32 tasks in parallel?  Or is it just running one task on one core?

I suspect based on the performance results and what Bzuco said about the TFlops difference that it *is* using the 32 cores.  It's just hard to tell since nothing is indicated in the log output.

Either way, I'm glad to see a significant speed boost, but I was expecting a bigger difference (based on my ignorance about how OpenCL works).  Also, I guess I just figured that a new top-of-the-line machine would run laps around a 9 year old machine.  Good thing I got the M1 Max with 32-cores.  I suspect the M1 Pro with fewer cores could have been slower than the old Mac Pro.

-Brian

50

Bug Reports / Re: 1.8 beta ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED

« on: November 02, 2021, 01:18:18 PM »

MacOS 12.0.1

51

General / Re: Disappointing performance results on new MacBook Pro M1 Max

« on: November 02, 2021, 05:36:49 AM »

Doesn't the VBO support just deal with OpenGL's vertex buffer objects to make the 3D model rendering a little faster?  Shouldn't have any effect on the actual Chunk processing I don't think.

I just ran another test on a larger project of 67 cameras and got these results:

M1 MacBook Pro:
Align = 0:58
Depth Map = 14:24
Mesh = 5:10

Mac Pro
Align = 1:30
Depth Map = 18:30
Mesh = 10:20

Pretty similar overall to the previous test.  Significantly faster, but not as fast as I was expecting.

I'm still unclear what the situation on GPU cores is.  Is Metashape only using 1 of my 32 cores?

-Brian

Also, try changing this in the Advanced settings under "Miscellaneous": "Enable VBO Support" - and also set the RAM to match your screenshot (43690 MB). I'm surprised it's not more, since you got the 64GB model, but whatever. It's still a ton of VRAM!

I have an RTX 3090 and my screenshot is attached. It definitely sped up the loading and viewing of meshes, but idk if it helps beyond that. Curious if it speeds up anything on your setup.

52

Bug Reports / VK Error when creating textures in 1.8

« on: November 02, 2021, 04:37:21 AM »

Testing out the 1.8 beta on my new MacBook Pro M1 Max, and while everything worked fine I did see this error in the log output right at the end when it was generating the texture:

2021-11-01 20:24:31 Failed to initialize context. Reason: VK Error : VkResult is "ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED" at line 66

It generated the texture just fine.  It seems to give this same error on both Orthophoto and Keep UV modes.  I didn't try any others to see if it does that for all of them.  However, running the exact same project on my old Mac Pro did not yield that error.  Here is more the log:

2021-11-01 20:24:31 Found 1 GPUs in 2.1e-05 sec (OpenCL: 1.7e-05 sec)
2021-11-01 20:24:31 Using device: Apple M1 Max, 32 compute units, 43690 MB global memory, OpenCL 1.2
2021-11-01 20:24:31   driver version: 1.2 1.0, platform version: OpenCL 1.2 (Oct  1 2021 19:40:58)
2021-11-01 20:24:31   max work group size 256
2021-11-01 20:24:31   max work item sizes [256, 256, 256]
2021-11-01 20:24:31   max mem alloc size 8192 MB
2021-11-01 20:24:31 Failed to initialize context. Reason: VK Error : VkResult is "ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED" at line 66
2021-11-01 20:24:31 Done "load_model" in 0
2021-11-01 20:24:31 blending textures... ************************************ done in 4.91948 sec
2021-11-01 20:24:36 postprocessing atlas... done in 6.45553 sec
2021-11-01 20:24:43 Finished processing in 12.99 sec (exit code 1)

53

General / Re: Disappointing performance results on new MacBook Pro M1 Max

« on: November 02, 2021, 04:20:21 AM »

I just ran another smaller test with just 37 cameras on both the new MacBook Pro and the old Mac Pro side-by-side and here's my results:

MacBook Pro M1 Max
Align = 0:26
Depth Map (Ultra) = 7:56
Mesh = 2:17
Texture:  0:12

Mac Pro
Align = 0:41
Depth Map (Ultra) = 10:50
Mesh = 4:31
Texture = 0:15

So, in this small test the new MacBook Pro actually outperformed the old Mac Pro by a considerable margin.  Twice as fast at Alignment and Meshing, and 3 minutes faster on Depth Map Generation.  That's quite an improvement, but still far short of what I was expecting with 32 GPU cores.

I'll run more tests later on larger data sets and see what happens.

-Brian

54

General / Re: Disappointing performance results on new MacBook Pro M1 Max

« on: November 02, 2021, 01:48:12 AM »

Right, but that's what I'm confused about because my new MacBook Pro has a "32-core GPU".  Not sure what the difference is between a 32-core GPU and 32 GPU's.

-Brian

55

General / Re: Disappointing performance results on new MacBook Pro M1 Max

« on: November 02, 2021, 12:29:48 AM »

I ran a small project (68 cameras) that I am familiar with and I know how long it takes to generate the Depth Maps (15 minutes) on the old Mac Pro.  I expected it to run 32 cores in parallel like it runs the 2 cores on my Mac Pro, so I thought it would be crazy-fast, but it's looking like a wash.

I'm going to run some other comparison tests tomorrow.  Might do a side-by-side with the old Mac.

-Brian

56

General / Disappointing performance results on new MacBook Pro M1 Max

« on: November 02, 2021, 12:12:09 AM »

My new MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chip and 32 GPU cores + 64gigs of RAM arrived today.  I ran a quick test with the Metashape 1.8 beta that runs natively on Apple Silicon and it's actually no faster, and possibly a tiny bit slower than on my old 2013 Mac Pro.

Even though my MacBook Pro has 32 GPU cores, Metashape is only using 1 of them.  It used both on my old Mac Pro, and that seems to be why the Mac Pro is faster.  When I go into the Preferences it shows "Apple M1 Max (32 compute units)".  Maybe I'm just confused about what I bought, but I assumed 32-GPU cores meant Metashape would use all 32 of those like it used the 2 on the old Mac Pro.  Instead, it's recognizing just 1 GPU, but with 32 compute units.  I'm not sure what the difference is.

-Brian

57

General / Re: New MacBook Pro with M1 Max chip

« on: October 20, 2021, 06:56:23 PM »

Right now I have the BuildDepthMaps/pm_ooc_ref_tile_size tweak set to 512 because my old Mac Pro was freezing up with the default tile size.  My plan is to just remove that tweak with the new MacBook Pro and see what happens, but if there's any performance gain to making it larger I can try that too because I essentially have unlimited VRAM on this machine.

-Brian

58

General / Re: New MacBook Pro with M1 Max chip

« on: October 20, 2021, 06:47:00 PM »

Will do!  I'm not exactly sure when it will arrive, but I was told it will ship on Monday.  My datas ets are usually around 80 photos, but I'll try something big to really push it.

Also, since I'll have 64GB of RAM / VRAM should I increase the default tile size from 2048 to something larger?  Or is it better to keep them smaller since I have 32 GPU cores?

-Brian

59

General / New MacBook Pro with M1 Max chip

« on: October 18, 2021, 09:19:24 PM »

Well, I just ordered a new MacBook Pro totally loaded with the M1 Max chip.  64 gig RAM and 32 GPU cores.  I don't know if Metashape will support all 32 cores, but I sure hope it does because I suspect it'll speed up processing about 20x over my old Mac with just 2 GPU cores that I've been using.

-Brian

60

General / Re: Mesh from Dense Point Cloud vs. Depth Maps

« on: October 18, 2021, 07:28:55 PM »

Heh, well, thanks for the suggestions, but the geometry it's creating is so bad under there and so interconnected to the top of the mesh that there's simply no way to remove it.  For now I'm just using 1.7.3 since that's the last version that worked properly.