Jump to content

Sunstrips killing my graphics card


Recommended Posts

Hi

 

When I bring 30 showtec sunstrips or chauvet sabers into vision and turn them on, I can no longer move the mouse, complete lockdown of the whole system (tried on two separate systems). Is a there something fundamental I am missing about this kind of fixture? I have another scene with 64 par cans and a ton of megapointes, and that does not overload like this.

 

I am curious though as to why this particular type of fixture is so heavy.

 

ps. I opened the same scene in vision 2019 and its runs significantly smoother than 2020, even with higher settings. Another mystery that I dont understand.

 

 

Thanks

Edited by fuberator
Link to comment
  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
On 2/16/2020 at 8:29 AM, fuberator said:

I opened the same scene in vision 2019 and its runs significantly smoother than 2020, even with higher settings. Another mystery that I dont understand.

 

I find this part particularly interesting, as in theory not much in the backend rendering has changed between 2019 and 2020.

Would you mind posting what versions of each you are using? ie; 2019 SP4 and 2020 SP2?

 

Lastly, if you could post your Vision file that would be great! We can play around with it internally to see where things are breaking down.

Link to comment
  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

(Posting here instead of PM so other users can benefit from this information)

 

Ahh, one thing I forgot about that was an enhancement request implemented in 2020 is textured haze. From the looks of it, the majority if your performance issues are caused by haze as opposed to shadows/surface lights/etc.

 

So let me break this down a little bit so you can understand how to get better performance in 2020 (and potentially even better performance in 2019). It does appear that there is still a regression somewhere that we need to track down. But, I want to help you out as much as possible in the meantime.

 

 

So, in 2019, you could use the older 2018 legacy style "sliced haze" (called Low Quality Haze Texture in 2020) or the new 2019 style haze (called Enhanced Volumetrics in 2019). The 2019 style haze was software ray traced, but did not allow for any texturing.

In 2020, we added 4D texturing to the 2019 style haze (we also unlocked a "full resolution" mode, which should generally only be used for rendered movies). I think this could be at least part of the performance issues you are seeing. But we need to investigate further.

 

When I run your file with default document and application preferences on my old old MBP in Vision 2019, I get roughly 10FPS just selecting the sunstrips in the Scene Graph.

When I run your file with default document and application preferences on my old old MBP in Vision 2020, I get roughly 1FPS. This is because the default document preference for Haze Style is the new 4D textured haze (the texturing aspect is controlled via the Haze Texture Intensity field). In order to do a better apples to apples comparison, we should try this same 2020 test with Haze Style set to None (as this is the equivalent of the 2019 style haze). In order to do a better apples to apples comparison, we should try this same 2020 test with Haze Style set to High-Quality 4D Haze - Half Resolution with a Haze Texture Intensity set to 0% (as this is roughly the equivalent of the 2019 style haze).

When I adjusted the 2020 Haze Style to None my FPS bumped up to 5FPS (a 500% increase in performance from 1FPS! hahahh). This is still not the 10FPS I am seeing in 2019, but substantially better than the 1FPS we are seeing in 2020 with default settings everywhere. This is the thing I want to investigate further as in theory 2019 and 2020 should perform nearly identical in this case.

When I adjusted the 2020 Haze Style to High-Quality 4D Haze - Half Resolution with a Haze Texture Intensity of 0%, my FPS bumped up to 9FPS (a 900% increase in performance from 1FPS! hahahh). This is still not the 10FPS I am seeing in 2019, but it is so close that I believe this is working as designed.

 

Lastly, I used a Haze Quality setting of 30% in all of these tests above. Generally, during my development and due to me having an older machine, I run with this set to 1% instead. Adjustments to the Haze Quality can make a big difference in render times. Since I noticed that the majority of your performance issues are caused by haze, I thought I should mention the Haze Quality application setting. So, lowering this setting in 2020 (or even in 2019) should result in better performance.

 

I will try to report back with any new information we find!

Edited by bbudzon
spelling errors / grammar, corrections
Link to comment
  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

So, reporting back as after discussing with our engineers, I realized I provided some incorrect information in the post above.

 

Haze Style None does NOT EQUAL 2019 style haze. Rather, it is closer to the 2018 style haze that used slices.

Haze Style High-Quality 4D Haze - Half Resolution with Haze Texture Intensity set to 0% is roughly equivalent to 2019 style haze.

 

After running a proper apples to apples comparison between 2019 and 2020, both are getting similar framerates as I expected.

2019 is getting roughly 10FPS.

2020 is getting roughly 9FPS.

 

If you have any questions about Haze Style or Haze Texture Intensity, please let me know! I will do my best to answer.

Link to comment

Hi

 

Thank you for checking it out!

 

I really love the haze in 2020 and it's a real selling point for me. However, even if I get to 10 fps its not going to be enough for programming a show in the visualiser, it's just too laggy. As you can see in the testfile, I have not even added any other lights yet. Is it up to graphichs card? I am using a 1070 TI in my visualiser system. If I spend a grand on a 2080, will I be able to to go full on with the haze?

 

hazers gonna haze

 

 

Link to comment
  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I like the 2020 haze too 🙂 It may just be that you turn it on for your final renderings but don't use it for real-time preprogramming.

 

FWIW, you should get much more than 9/10FPS given you use the same default settings I used in my tests. My machine is OOOLLLLD. Like, going on 5 years old 😛 I have an AMD Radeon R9 M370X with only 2GB of memory. Your 1070Ti should destroy my graphics card 🤣

 

One thing I would do is ensure you are running with settings similar to my own. All I did was open your v3s, then launch the application and document preference dialogs. In each, I selected <Default> from the saved sets dropdown. This will get us "on the same page". But again, your 1070Ti should well outperform my M370X.

 

If this is still not getting you the performance you want, I would suggest tweaking the default application/document settings to get the performance you need. This was a big improvement to Vision, as in the past you had no ability to adjust settings to tweak performance/quality.

  • As we've already discussed, setting Haze Texture Intensity to 0% helps substantially.
  • Adjusting Haze Quality will make a big difference as well.
  • Think about playing with things like Resolution Quality, Render Shadows, and Shadow Quality as well.

My only suggestion here is to be forgiving of quality in real-time. Vision can get the HQ renderings in a rendered movie/still.

 

 

As far as purchasing of more powerful hardware:

It's hard to say if upgrading to a 2080 will result in enough performance gains to be worth the cost. We've had some customers really ball out on a machine, only to find that there are limitations in Vision's code holding back the hardware. This probably seems obvious, but in general, no software can scale infinitely to leverage all hardware. There is always an upper bound on the code design itself. We generally find that Vision leverages as much hardware as you can throw at it (ie; 2x1080Ti's in SLI performed almost twice as fast as a single 1080Ti). But again, there is always an upper limit as to how much hardware software can use.

Link to comment

hi

 

setting the texture intensity to 0% made a huge impact! 

 The real FPS killer is resolution. I have to go low and live with some heavy pixellation in order to stay over 10 fps.

 

Interesting still that these sunstrips are so extreme. I tried another scene with a ton of lights with the same settings and I am getting almost twice the FPS

 

the texture intensity is definitely the key to a higher framerate

 

 

Link to comment
  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I'm glad you're getting slightly improved performance! Tweaking the scene/fixture/geometry/render settings is always an interesting balancing act. I'm curious as to how much Haze Quality impacts the rendering speed. (And generally, run in realtime with shadows OFF. Only enable shadows for rendered movies/stills. This is the default behavior.)

 

One last "power user tip" that a lot of people aren't aware of; there is a Force Emissive flag for fixtures that prevents beams and surfaces lights from rendering. When this option is enabled, all that is rendered is the lens and the bloom effect for that lens. Fixtures that have multiple light emitters can really kill performance depending on how many emitters there are and how many of these fixtures are in the scene. So while the Force Emissive flag isn't very helpful when the light is being used to, say, wash a stage, it can be very helpful in certain instances (such as generic blinders). We often use this flag internally for Nexus 4x4's and the like 😉

 

Link to comment
Guest Beckstorm

@fuberator One thing to keep in mind is that each unit has, if I remember correctly, 10 lights in the strip.  So it's not just 30 lights, each light in the strip counts so its actually 300 lights you have in the document.   

Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...