Recommended Hardware?

[akemono]

Hey guys,

We already have a license and the software is a real treat. I'm absolutely loving Photoscan, just the current system might need a upgrade to process the data faster.

I am currently using a I7 920 with 12 GB ram and radeon hd 7750 graphics card.
What kind of systeem would be the best i could currently buy? I mean what kind of hardware do you guys use to process your meshes?

I already look around the internet a bit for a more powerful system and came across the following:
Sandy bridge E : I7-3930K
32 Gb mem
Asus p9x79
128 Gb SSD
NVidea GTX 580

Would this system be a good upgrade? And any and all recommendations are welcome!

best,
Mike

[Kjellis85]

Seems like a pretty decent setup, should be an improvement to your current one. But it all really comes down to your budget. The more memory you can stuff into the system the better. As for the GPU you could go all out with the new HD 7970 or wait for NVidia to release its 680 next month (rumor).

Btw, did you mean 6750? No such thing as a 7750 ...yet

[akemono]

Thanks Kjellis85 for your feedback!

So your saying that 32GB of ram could not be enough in some cases? So 64GB would be even better... Hmm i'll have a look around if that would still be on the budget.

What kind of system are you using Kjellis85?

Btw, i meant the 5770

Best,
Mike

[Kjellis85]

I am running on a HP Z400 workstation, which isn't really made for the task. It performs ok, but my home system performce whay better. This is mostly because of the dualcore Xeon processor and the Quadro FX 1800 GPU. At home I have a "budget" system, which I have tested with photoscan for performace. It cost me around 2k$ us (in Norway). Its an AMD 1090t black edition with 12GB RAM and a Asus GeForce 570GTX.

But I almost never use huge image sets (100+), and if I do I run them at medium or low geometry reconstruction. If I didn't I couldn't get anything done the rest of the day/next couple of days

I am sure Alexey Pasumansky can give you better explanations as to why memory is important and how the program utilize the different hardware. But my best advise is testing the different settings on the hardware you currently have to see what gives you the best results. Even the best hardware in the world has its limitations.

[akemono]

Well your right about the limitations that all current systems have. 

Our main goal is to use Arial photo's to reconstruct a city/rural area, but because of the high expectations and quality standard my company has we require a lot of overlap so we can shoot the area in one go.
This however has the downside of generating a lot of images that has to be processed. 
And it take like, forever to get a mesh out of it.

Currently i am running some test with 500 images, but that will likely increase overtime to incorporate a larger area. Processing the mesh at "Medium Quality" with around 500 images will make the program halt on the "Generate Mesh" stage, and it gives me the " Out of memory" error. Kinda annoying but it generates it nevertheless with "Low".

Perhaps a question for you Alexey Pasumansky, what would you recommend as a system that has to be able to process a lot of images (500+)?

Best,
Mike

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello Mike,

Currently we recommend one of the following desktop hardware configurations:

1. The cheaper one:
    CPU: Intel Sandy Bridge 2600 or 2700
    RAM: DDR3-1600, 4 x 4 GB (16 GB total) or 4 x 8 GB (32 GB total)
    GPU: NVidia GeForce GTX 580 (optional)

2. The better one:
    CPU: Intel Sandy Bridge 3930K
    Motherboard: any model with 8 DDR3 slots and at least 1 PCI Express x16 slot (for example, ASUS P9X79 PRO or Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5)
    RAM: DDR3-1600, 8 x 4 GB (32 GB total) or 8 x 8 GB (64 GB total)
    GPU: NVidia GeForce GTX 580 (optional)

[akemono]

Thanks for you reply Alexey Pasumansky!

Now im even more sure to go for the Sandy Bridge 3930K, and 64GB of ram!
It's just a matter of finding the 3930K They are in short supply in Europe....

[Kjellis85]

It's just a matter of finding the 3930K They are in short supply in Europe....

http://www.dustinhome.no/socket-2011/xgroup/24888 as an example. They are in stock in every online store in Norway. http://prisguide.hardware.no/produkt/intel-core-i7-3930k-152613 this shows every store that has it in stock. Use google translate or babelfish.

[terry]

we already have a I7-3930K and 32 Gb of ram but we overlooked the gpu when purchasing
would we get decent a performance improvement by installing one of these:

NVidia GeForce GTX 580 (possibly 2 with sli)
NVidia GeForce GTX 590
AMD Radeon™ HD 7970

and if so which one would give the best performance?

Thanks
Terry

[Wishgranter]

580 have a higher clock, 590 save you one PCI-E slot, the AMD 7970 could be a speedup, see results from LUXMARK, the OpenCL benchmark http://www.luxrender.net/luxmark/ see the first two results, first is the 580 but 8 units and the second is a 7970 just 4x but see the resulting points in this benchmark.....

[Wishgranter]

upps, better go this link http://www.luxrender.net/luxmark/top/top20/Room same benchmark machine config......

[Kjellis85]

If it is not very urgent i would recommend waiting until April or so when the GTX 600-series is released, with the 680 said to have a 45% better performance rating than the HD7970.

Source: http://lenzfire.com/2012/02/entire-nvidia-kepler-series-specifications-price-release-date-43823/

[Wishgranter]

http://www.techpowerup.com/160263/NVIDIA-GeForce-Kepler-Packs-Radically-Different-Number-Crunching-Machinery.html

and that just the GK104 core, the GK110 should be much stronger, im considering to wait for Nvidia too.
 

[akemono]

Well we already bought the GTX 570, but we can always a anotherone to that if it's not quick enough. Plus a HD 7950 should also give you a good price/performance.

[akemono]

Sorry to bump this but i wanted to follow up on how our new hardware performs.

The new systeem preforms at least 3 times faster then my old systeem! Which is incredible!
And there is even room for improvement, we could get another GTX 570 which in turn would make the systeem 50% faster still!

They only downside is that even with 64Gb of ram i would still get a "out of memory" error when i try to process 84 16mpix images. Usualy this happens at the "creating mesh" stage after the depth calculation. Is this normal?? Because i thought that 64Gb would be plenty to use the software to it's full potential....

Best,
Mike