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Author Topic: Computer Specification Advice  (Read 3289 times)

Cambodia7

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Computer Specification Advice
« on: September 07, 2020, 12:01:15 AM »
I have 2 questions that you can help me with. We are using Agisoft Metashape and have had ongoing trouble with the time it takes to process as well as some amount of consistent crashing. It takes approximately 22 hours of processing to do our End of Month Survey scan processing. Our current computer configuration is: Intel i7-7700 @ 3.6GHz, 32GB RAM, NVidia Quadro P2000 Graphics Card, Seagate SCSI Disk Drive. Can you see if there is anything about this configuration that may cause the slow processing?  :o

We are proposing to upgrade this computer with the following specification: Asus Custom Build Workstation with Intel i9-10900K Processor, Corsair Hydro H100x Cooler, 128GB Memory, 500GB NVMe SSD+2TB NVMe SSD, Gigabyte RTX2080Ti Graphics Card. Can you see anything within this specification that is incompatible with Agisoft and could we expect a decent improvement in performance? If so, would you be able to estimate roughly the amount of improvement?

andyroo

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Re: Computer Specification Advice
« Reply #1 on: September 09, 2020, 05:12:33 AM »
Hard to say how "slow" that is. What are the characteristics of your processing? How many images? How many megapixels? what processing steps?

Re your system upgrade -

Personally I wouldn't waste money on the 2080 Ti - I'd get the 2080 Super instead, and spend the savings on faster system RAM or something. The EVGA hybrid water cooled models are nice because they run cool and you're less likely to get thermal throttling.

as far as how much faster than the P2000 - my guess would be somewhere between 4x and 16x. you have 4x the cuda cores and 4x the memory bandwidth, so just a rough guess. Curious though, would love it if you report back.

William George at Puget Systems has a series of great articles to review re Metashape performance when you're thinking about new builds by the way (I couldn't post a link direct to the metashape content because of the filter brackets in the URL).

Arie

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Re: Computer Specification Advice
« Reply #2 on: September 10, 2020, 01:08:41 PM »
andyroo made some great suggestions and Pudget Systems is really good resource for deciding on hardware.
If time permits it, I would wait for Nvidias new 3000s series of GPUs.  They seem to be very promising for FP32 calculations, which Metashape uses.
Cheers!

Cambodia7

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Re: Computer Specification Advice
« Reply #3 on: September 14, 2020, 08:56:24 AM »
Thanks for the advice. Can't really wait for new cards as the processing delays are costing us already. It seems the P2000 is the worst of the bottlenecks but I think we're in the mood for a major re-fit all round. That should give us some future proofing. I'll see if management approves this specification and report back with some benchmarks.

andyroo

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Re: Computer Specification Advice
« Reply #4 on: November 07, 2020, 09:41:12 AM »
Wanted to point out a nice benchmark William George over at Puget Systems did on the new cards, with a pretty good spread of cards compared. These are the cards they tested:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 24GB     NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 10GB     NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 8GB
NVIDIA Titan RTX 24GB
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11GB     NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER 8GB     NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER 8GB     NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8GB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB

Also if you want to benchmark your own systems against their benchmarks, William has created and released a very nice benchmarking script and set of imagery - the extended benchmark is enough to use even on powerful systems to get an idea of relative performance. The standard one is probably a little small to fully stress the multi-GPU and multi-CPU rigs for a good comparison.

We have been using a modified version of his awesome script (only because we've been modding it on our own to keep up with versions) with the extended benchmark files to compare and tweak our systems and look at the effect of upgrades.

Also hot off the press William published a SWEET benchmark comparison of Metashape 1.6.5 performance on 14 different AMD and intel CPUS.

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X     AMD Ryzen 9 5900X     AMD Ryzen 9 3950X     AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X     AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT   AMD Ryzen 5 5600X     AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT
AMD TR 3990X     AMD TR 3970X     AMD TR 3960X
Intel Core i9 10900K     Intel Core i7 10700K     Intel Core i5 10600K

If you're like me and geek out a bit on the hardware configuring, you'll be drooling over this...

Disclaimer - I don't work for Puget Systems or receive any remuneration for my endorsements, and I generally prefer to build my own workstations. But I grew up in the PacNW, and I really like them and their systems ;-)

Finally - I know William has put a ton of work into this benchmark - if you use it make sure to thank him!

Andy