Jump to content

ProfZ

Member
  • Posts

    2
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by ProfZ

  1. I'm meh about the color change. GUI has to evolve, so as long as the style is cohesive, it's fine to me. Even with the meh feelings on the monochrome change; some of the icons are more clear as to their function I think, especially in the basic pallet. I wouldn't mind the monochrome look being an option, since it will slow some folks down so much. Good opportunity to force more of your favorite tools into your keyboard shortcut muscle memory! 😄 I am hot and cold about the total reboot of how the top ribbon works to a MUCH greater degree. Some of the UI is better, and some seems moved for the sake of starting over with no cause. The defaults also seem like they were picked by someone who doesn't use the software. Why would I need so much screen real estate persistently dedicated to font settings, for example? I still have to select the text to apply a change... so why not use the OIP; as is the syntax for 90% of other object types?
  2. Can Vectorworks add a "compute on GPU" option to Renderworks modes? OR, if the programming obstacles are too high, can Vectorworks create a new class of rendering modes that are run on GPU compute so they massively faster than raytracing on a CPU, but with more fidelity options than OpenGL? I'm happy to say; I just got a screaming fast video card for my primary workstation. This is primarily to have enough VRAM for Vectorworks' VRAM-hungry OpenGL render mode. On my main machine I've gone from the AMD "Pro" 460 discrete internal GPU with 4 GB, to an RX580 with 8GB for about a year in an eGPU, to now a Radeon VII with 16 GB of the fastest VRAM on the market. Around my office, we also have a Titan X(p) in our windows machine and a few Vega FEs with 12GB and 16GB respectively. To be clear, we don't run out of VRAM on the 12GB+ cards, I just got the VII because of the 1TB/s HMB2 is as fast as it gets without spending all the dollars; and Vectorworks is a connoisseur of VRAM. The difference in framerate stability and model pop-in is quite noticeable with each step up that ladder when working in big files. However, the amount of processing power that Vectorworks utilizes on those ever more expensive cards is largely flat for a given resolution. Anecdotally meaning: a model that would utilize 90% of the GPU clock on my 460, will utilize maybe 65% on my 580, and less than 40% on my VII. While dropping many thousands of dollars on video cards and enclosures has absolutely made the user experience a more pleasant and stable one, when it comes time to do a high quality render, most of our users are back down to 4 CPU cores. The performance difference is so stark, that we have a dedicated workstation just for rendering-out big packets with a 14 core Xeon. I'm contemplating a 64-core Ryzen down the road, but good golly it would be nice to dump off something like a ray-traced render to a piece of hardware that is purpose built for something so easily made massively multithreaded. like a GPU. Maybe this means tearing Renderworks down to the ground.... but Apple is always going on about how easy it is to move code written in C over to Metal. So, while I waited 28 minutes for my render to export, I figured I should suggest it. I was frankly surprised by how quickly the developers of DaVinci Resolve put out a Metal API enabled export module, and really impressed by the 20-30% speed increase over OpenCL. I know that some users will try to use a GPU-compute mode on integrated-GPUs that are like to see worse performance. However; unlocking horsepower for the typical user that has a capable discreet GPU would save me, for one, dozens of man-hours per week I imagine. The dialog could even offer some low grade benchmark to let the use know what the time difference would be for a given set of hardware. Food for thought.
×
×
  • Create New...