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[QUOTE]johnp wrote
Hi Lasse,

As an update to your requirements, I'm very pleased (relieved!) to report that Capture Polar (with the Polar Graphics) appears to work extremely well on an ATI graphics card.

I have upgraded a lab full of iMacs dual-booting MacOS and Windows and after a certain amount of ATI Driver hackery have a very functional result.

If anyone has an iMac and is having problems with getting the graphics to function, the reason is that Apple's own, supplied drivers are actually incorrect! If you'd like to know how I went about correcting them, let me know and I'll happily share the info.

However, short of fullscreen vsualisation being a bit slow, I'm pleased to say that an iMac with 256MB ATI Graphics (Core2 Duo 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM) is perfectly capable of running Polar Graphics when appropriately 'persuaded'.

Oh yes, and XP, not Vista.

Hope this helps,

-john[/QUOTE]

Hi John!

I got a brand new MacBook Pro with dual display adapters (NVIDIA GeForce 9400M and 9600M GT with 512MB). I got windows XP installed and I still cant believe that when I fullscreen my stage setup in capture - a major lag comes around. Ive updated newest drivers with Driver Genious witch updates all the drivers, not just display drivers.. My display settings (in Nvidia control panel) are in default. And I dont even have a firewall or anti-virus witch could slow the system down. Do you have any tips how to "hack" the drivers or the system to work fully in fullscreen? Capture works fine when its not in fullscreen.

Specs: MacBook Pro 2,8GHz, 4GB RAM DDR3, hard-drive with 7200 RPM, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M and 9600M GT with 512MB of GDDR3 memory, Windows XP SP3 32bit and newest windows updates.

Please reply to me via email: panu.pikkuaho@gmail.com

Thanks!

[quote="Flo"]Hello Capture-Team,

In order not to open a new thread, I take this one to ask some quesions about the hardware requirements of capture polar.
I'planning to get a Polar Basic the next weeks. But I still need some hardware for the software.
As lighting-design is not my main job and I still have to get a magicQ pc wing, the costs for the hardware should be not too high.
I could get a Mobile Workstation Dell Precison M90 for an affordable price.
So I could use it not only in my working room with the TFTs but also in my living room with the beamer, in order to have it comfortable while creating designs.
It has a 2.3 GHz Core2Duo with 2GB Ram and a Nvidia Quadro FX2500M with 512MB of RAM and Win XP
So my question is: Is this Workstation good enough to run the software properly?
Thanks in advance for your help.

Best regards,
lighting
[/quote]

I'm in a similar situation: lighting-design is not at the moment my main job. Even though i'm going to buy a Capture polar Smartsoft Edition.
This is my pc:

Windows 7 professional 32 bit
Pentium IV 2,93 ghz
1,25 GB Ram
Ati Radeon x300 128 mb

I'd like to know if would be enough upgrading my RAM at 2 GB and buyng a new Video card (could you please suggest me one?) to make Capture run properly. I think I'll use no more than 12 moving heads and 40 Par/PC in my shows.
Thanks in advance for your help.
P.S. Sorry for my english!

Hi Cristiano,

It's always difficult to say, but I will try to make an educated guess. Upgrading to 2GB ram is definitely a good idea, if only for Windows sake. I'm a bit worried about the graphics card though, my gut feeling is that you will need to upgrade that. I would recommend downloading and trying the demo with your current configuration first as a benchmark!

I'm going to buy 2Gb RAM.
About the video Card, do you think that this one would be enough for me?

Point Of View Geforce 8400gs 1gb Ddr3 Hdmi Fan Dvi/Hdmi/D-Sub
- Core Clock: 589 Mhz
- Memory Clock 1000 Mhz
- RAMDAC: Dual 400 Mhz

Hi Cristiano,

I believe that should get you quite far, yes!

It all depends on what you are simulating.
I have a I7-920, 12GB of RAM and a GTX260 Core216.
I notice that if you use a lot of stuff like matrix blinders and sunstrips, you performance suffers from this. I see my quality and FPS drop from 100% and 24fps to about 20% and 10fps when I use 10 sunstrips.

However, when I use the 30 ledpars, hungaroflash and 16 250MSD yokes in the show simultaneously... no sweat. quality and fps stay at max.
I use the 16 Octostrips simultaneously, same stuff happens as with the sunstrips.

Capture is really awesome software, but this is a "problem" that has been around since I bought the soft. The sunstrips were patched not to show beams anymore and this helped a lot, but now with the (very very nice) dynamic fog it has come back.
I really think a card like a GTX260 should be able to hold it's own for this small amount of fixtures in a program that works brilliantly when just using a shitload of moving heads or PAR spots.
Simulating something like sunstrip matrix is simply impossible this way.

I'd be happy to buy a faster card, say a GTX560Ti, if this would solve this lag for me. But I fear it has more to do with the programming of capture than my card not being able to handle the rendering...

Hi desolation,

The reason these fixtures (Sunstrip, Octostrip..) cause a slowdown is that they are multiple lightsource fixtures. The Sunstrip for example has 10 beams, so one Sunstrip is worth 10 LED-pars. On top of this, these fixtures are often directed into the audience (and the camera). Fixtures directed into the camera require more GPU power to render because they affect a larger portion of the screen. So, a Sunstrip focused into the audience is probably actualy as heavy as 20 LED-pars focused on-stage. This doesn't really have anything to do with the programming at all.

We will be looking into reducing the quality of the rendering of such fixtures though, to reduce the horsepowers required.

I have here a Xeon Quad core, running on XP, 2GB of Ram and a GTX580 card. This runs fantastic the open air project with 5x 5x5jarag and a 40x10 RGB matrix together with all the other lights. The graphics card type does change a lot in performance !

Allright Luc, thank you for the feedback. A GTX580 is over budget, but I will be looking into upgrading to a GTX560Ti then. How much is performance affected by the amount of graphics ram? The price difference between a 1GB and 2GB card is not that big, and I am running 1600x1200 and 1920x1200.

Lars, are you planning on using true hardware acceleration like CUDA in Capture?
I ask because I have seen great improvements in the rendering of physics application in software like Maya3D or 3DS Max while using CUDA acceleration. It would be pretty neat to be able to re-use our "old" graphics cards that are CUDA or OPENCL enabled when upgrading the main graphics this way.

Hi desolation,

We might look into this further down the road, but at the moment it's not part of the plan. The catch is that when you calculate information not only on the GPU, it needs to be moved there at some point, which also takes time from the GPU. So, while it may make sense to distribute computations between the GPU, the CPU and possibly also a CUDA/OpenCL'ish thing, there is also a cost to gathering up all the results, which can very well result in a Pyrrhus victory. =)