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Author Topic: New Mac pro and PS  (Read 7783 times)

holgar

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New Mac pro and PS
« on: October 29, 2013, 12:10:26 PM »
Hello All,
I am about to decide weather I buy the new Mac Pro. I wonder if PS can benefit from the Two FirePro GPU the MacPro provides. Or will PS only use one GPU? Does PS even use Open CL?
Another Question: Anyone tried PS on the new OSX Mavericks?
Thank you for any Hint.
Greetings, Holger

Alexey Pasumansky

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Re: New Mac pro and PS
« Reply #1 on: October 29, 2013, 04:34:54 PM »
Hello Holger,

PhotoScan utilizes OpenCL devices during depth maps computation step and several GPUs can be used simultaneously (but not in SLI/CrossFire mode). But as for FirePro cards they should not be very fast in terms of PhotoScan performance.
Best regards,
Alexey Pasumansky,
Agisoft LLC

Limpopo_River

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Re: New Mac pro and PS
« Reply #2 on: November 09, 2013, 01:13:05 AM »
Re:  Mavericks:  I recently upgraded my Mac Mini OS X from Mountain Lion (10.8.5) to Mavericks (10.9) and found that I can't open my PhotoScan projects that I could open previously using the older Mountain Lion OS.  I'm using PhotoScan Standard Edition 0.9.1, which I installed before the OS X upgrade to Mavericks.   I'm guessing my difficulty is due to a lack of memory resources, but I'm not sure why Mavericks OS X would have more of a problem than the older Mountain Lion.

Basic info:  CPU:  Intel quad-core i7 2.6 GHz, integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics, 16 Gb RAM.

Side question:  What should my preference settings be for this processor?  In the Preferences dialogue for OpenCL, I've set the CPU to use 3 out of 8 possible cores (I subtracted 4 from 8 cores to eliminate hyperthreading and subtracted 1 more because I checked the box to use the Intel HD 4000 for OpenCL processing, per the note below the box).  For some operations, checking the Intel HD 4000 box for OpenCL causes display issues (flickering, horizontal bands, and crashes), and for others it seems to make no difference in performance.  I haven't noticed any advantage by checking the OpenCL box.  Is it better to uncheck the OpenCL box with the integrated graphics and use 4 or possibly even 8 cores with hyperthreading?

For an example of the difficulty I'm having with Mavericks OS X, I tried opening a project with 171 cams with a .psz file size of nearly 10 Gb.  It loads 100%, but the program hangs without rendering the point cloud or shaded mesh (I haven't added texture to it yet).  I could open this project on the older Mountain Lion OS X with a long wait, but now the program hangs and the computer completely stops after it loads the file.  I can't even force quit the program and I have to turn the power off to reboot.

I'm also having problems processing new PhotoScan projects on the Mavericks OS.  On a new project with 68 cams, image alignment (mild filtering) worked fine, but when I tried to generate the mesh (high resolution with the limit on faces set to 0) it crashed two times after it reached the end of the "generate mesh" step, which took about 3.5 hours for each run.  The progress bar reached 100%; the log file indicates the process was completed successfully and makes no mention of any problems; but I never had a chance to save the results because the program just closed when it reached the end. 

Also, when I checked "Reuse depth maps" in the generate mesh dialogue box so as not to have to repeat the work it already completed, it simply gave me an error and said it couldn't construct the model, so I had to start mesh generation over from scratch after each crash.  I didn't have this problem generating a mesh with 171 cams in Mountain Lion OS, using images from the same data set. 

Thank you for your responses and suggestions!

alexxhenry

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Re: New Mac pro and PS
« Reply #3 on: November 12, 2013, 10:47:00 PM »
I'm also curious about expected performance increases for the MacPro.

Alexey, my understanding is that, depending on the PhotoScan algorithms, if the working set fits in the 30Mb L3 and didn’t fit in the current Mac Pro’s 12Mb L3 cache, we're going to see a big improvement in speed.  Otherwise, the main speed-up is likely to be closer to the ratio of the speed increase of memory, which has been bumped up from 1333MHz to 1866MHz. Can you confirm?

-Alexx

Hello Holger,

PhotoScan utilizes OpenCL devices during depth maps computation step and several GPUs can be used simultaneously (but not in SLI/CrossFire mode). But as for FirePro cards they should not be very fast in terms of PhotoScan performance.

Wishgranter

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Re: New Mac pro and PS
« Reply #4 on: November 13, 2013, 10:57:20 AM »
Hi Limpopo, what triangle count was on the 171 cam setup ? texture size ??

Same with the 68 cam setup.. triangle count, texture size
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someDude

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Re: New Mac pro and PS
« Reply #5 on: February 18, 2014, 12:16:07 AM »
But as for FirePro cards they should not be very fast in terms of PhotoScan performance.

Hello Alexey,
Could you give a hint why this is the case? I was expecting a pretty decent speed, since I believed that apple put these in to increase OpenCL performance.

I'm waiting for a project to come up and have to get new hardware. If I would actually take the punch in my wallet and go for a Xeon setup, a mac pro could be one of the options.

Thanks