Messages

301

Feature Requests / Re: PS 1.0 feedback

« on: December 04, 2013, 12:43:48 PM »

But that's the point. I would prefer not to switch modes. Instead, I'd like to hold down Alt while left/right-click-dragging in order to quickly change the viewpoint, release Alt and continue with selection, for example.

I agree with this comment. The viewport navigation in Max/Maya is very nice and quick. For those of used to 3D applications, the navigation in Photoscan does feel a bit akward.

Maya viewport navigation works like this:

Alt+LMB = Rotate
Alt+RMB = Zoom in/out
Alt+MMB = Pan Left/Right/Up/Down

Another issue with viewport navigation is that the more you zoom in, the less responsive the camera panning becomes. So when I am zoomed in on a detail, I need to wildly move my mouse dozens of times to move the camera a small distance.

302

General / Re: PS = GPU killer?

« on: November 29, 2013, 09:42:22 PM »

In my experience Photoscan doesn't nearly draw as much power as the maximum rating of the components .  For example,  my system with an i7 (TPD 130 Watt)  and 2x Amd R9 290 does not exceed 450 watt when using Photoscan.  This is with full cpu and gpu load.

*Edit: it actually peaked 600 Watt according to my power meter (which tracks the highest value). But that seems to be very rare.

If you look at the official wattage of the components you would expect a power draw of well over 700 watt.

So the only way to be sure it to hook your system up to an energy meter,  and get the practical result.

303

General / Re: What exactly do the reconstruction Quality labels mean?

« on: November 24, 2013, 01:08:53 AM »

I wonder why you don't call it that way

Agree, would suggest to extend the label like:

Ultra (Original image size)
High (Reduced by 2)
Med (Reduced by 4)

and so on...

I would do it like this:



The user interface is more complex this way, but this way it shows exactly what the setting means.

The Custom input field would become editable if the user selects "Custom" from the drop down menu. Right now the step between Ultra (100%) and High (50%) is really high. It would be nice to be able to set it to 75% for example.

304

General / Re: Is the AMD 7970 graphics card still the best option for PhotoScan?

« on: November 22, 2013, 11:57:57 AM »

Here are the results for the 'official' benchmark file, point cloud on Ultra:

finished depth reconstruction in 133.39 seconds
Device 1 performance: 765.774 million samples/sec (Hawaii)
Device 2 performance: 762.169 million samples/sec (Hawaii)
Total performance: 1527.94 million samples/sec

So with the official file, the R290 is about 25% faster than a 7970.

305

General / Re: Is the AMD 7970 graphics card still the best option for PhotoScan?

« on: November 21, 2013, 12:27:24 AM »

Results for Crossfire AMD R290 (non-X model):

finished depth reconstruction in 2699.58 seconds
Device 1 performance: 114.716 million samples/sec (CPU)
Device 2 performance: 621.508 million samples/sec (Hawaii)
Device 3 performance: 614.536 million samples/sec (Hawaii)
Total performance: 1350.76 million samples/sec

So not really faster than the 7970, which is a bit of a disappointment. One of the cards seemed to be throttled down 50% of the time according to GPU-Z, but I am not sure how accurate the reporting is. Temperature and fans speeds are both below the limits, so it's not because it's overheating. This was using 8 out of 12 CPU cores (I hoped freeing up extra cores would keep the GPUs busy).

By the way, is there a specific test file you guys use to measure the performance?

306

General / Re: How bandwidth intensive (PCIe) is Photoscan?

« on: November 19, 2013, 10:14:23 PM »

Thanks, that's promising!

This is still hypothetically speaking. I was looking at the crazy Bitcoin mining rigs with 6x AMD 7950 cards, and I just wondered if that would work for Photoscan as well

307

General / How bandwidth intensive (PCIe) is Photoscan?

« on: November 19, 2013, 08:57:03 PM »

How bandwidth intensive is Photoscan? Bitcoin miners aren't very bandwidth intensive for example, you can plug a graphics card in a PCI 1x slot and the performance would be similar to a card in a PCI 16x slot (because the card spends most it's time crunching numbers, and doesn't send/receive much data).

Is this the same with Photoscan? Could I use an extra graphics card in a PCI 1x slot, or would this card have low performance?

308

General / Re: sequence of photo alignment

« on: November 18, 2013, 06:14:58 PM »

Using Generic pre-selection will speed up the processing of the big datasets. As James already mentioned, in this case PhotoScan will try to find overlapping images using downscaled images at first and then will be matching only such images and not every pair.

Thanks Alexey and James!

I mistakenly thought that the pair selection was only when using camera pairs (2 cameras at a fixed distance). Perhaps this option should be called 'pre-scan' instead, so it is more clear what it does?

My 18 hour alignment is almost done, with the next alignment I'll have it enabled, I am very curious how it will impact the speed!

309

General / Re: sequence of photo alignment

« on: November 17, 2013, 12:58:50 PM »

I have a question that is somewhat related to this: when doing the alignment, does Photoscan try to match all points in all photos to eachother?

Because in situations like this, there are only matches to be found in the 3-4 nearest photos:



Trying to match the points between photos in the first and last row would be a waste of time because there can never be a match.

So does Photoscan make a quick pre-scan to see which photos share the same features? If not, that might be a really nice optimization to speed up the alignment phase.