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What makes the most difference in performace?
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J. Musselman
New Member
Posts: New Member

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2012-10-14 19:29
    Hi Lars, As I continue work on the Pink Floyd vis (and a couple others), I'm seeing extremely poor performance issues as the designs get more involved. My current setup was an Asus P5Q3 MB with a 3GHz Intel core 2 duo CPU running XP-32 bit , 4GB memory, 1TB raid-0 HD, and a GE-Force 9500 GT graphics card. It was OK until I went to live view, then it would take maybe 30 seconds to display. Moving or rotating would lock it up. I changed the graphics card to a Geforce 480GT (with current drivers), which also required a new power supply. Helped a little, but not much...disappointing for a $200 card. I then downloaded a Win8-64 bit 'release preview'. LIghtfactory and Capture run on that but it still takes a good 10 seconds to refresh the live view. There's one layer in my project that is a semi-transparent stage floor...if I disable that , performance doubles instantly...but still not really great. I'm seeing less than 20 fps and 50-75% quality when I move rotate in live view. I went through layers and selected 'not affected by light' or whatever it is for all not-essential layers, and that didn't seem to help either. Adding dynamic haze cripples it. So my question is ...what items (in order) have the most impact on performance in capture... Motherboard, CPU speed, memory capacity/speed, graphics card, operating system, disk drive speed, number of fixtures, number of elements in design, transparency, etc. Lots of things to consider, I know, but I'm at the point of upgrading the motherboard/CPU in my desktop, or switching to some sort of powerful laptop with ability to add a second display...which would travel better. Any advice is appreciated, and if it would help, I can send you a copy of the capture file in question. Thanks! Jerry Musselman

    Lars Wernlund
    Staff Member
    Posts:2016 Staff Member

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    2012-10-31 21:51
    Hi Jerry,

    Your design is quite large and I'm not surprised that a 200 USD card doesn't cut it. For things of this scale you need to start looking at high end cards such as the NVidia 6xx series.

    Some hardware performance advice:
    - GPU is everything. This is the number 1 thing to invest in.
    - RAM is quite irrelevant. Once you have enough, more of it won't help at all. The speed of the RAM does play some role, especially if you have a complex stage design (typically imported detailed scenery), when you open the project or when you move things around. However, when 'just visualizing', faster RAM makes almost no difference at all.
    - Disk drive speed is only relevant when updating the library, not at all while visualizing.
    - CPU is relevant, but perhaps only 5-10% as important as the GPU.

    In your design:
    - The number of lights is very important, and how many of them that move at the same time (both pan and tilt as well as gobo rotations or iris/frost effects). More important however is how much of your screen is covered in beams - this is the largest performance killer. Disable the atmosphere completely for a second to see exactly how much GPU that uses!
    - Transparency is expensive too because Capture needs to break down the rendering in multiple passes which slows things down. Exactly how expensive depends on a number of factors and very difficult to say.
    - Screen resolution and window sizes. The higher resolution and larger visualization window the more pixels on screen with lighting need to be rendered. Reduce screen resolution and zoom out a bit and you will notice a massive performance increase.

    Hope this helps!

    Technical Director
    Capture Visualisation AB
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