[Paraview] Software Rendering or Hardware Rendering

[Burlen Loring]

Hi Kevin,

ParaView can use  the GPU's and serial rendering performance is better 
with the GPU. Parallel performance is a little harder to pin down, since 
when multiple processes feed the same GPU this creates resource 
contention which when the ratio of processes to GPU's is high hurts 
performance. The performance you see all depends on the specific GPUs 
and CPUs in question and the specifics of your use case such as dataset 
size, poly's vs volume rendering, number of procs per gpu and so on.

You could very easily have two ParaView builds, one for hardware 
rendering and one for software rendering available on the same system 
and select the one to use as needed.

To use PV in parallel you need to build it yourself, I'm assuming you 
have done this. If you haven't taken precautions to build PV for use 
with OSMesa then you are using what ever OpenGL library is found, you 
can take a look in the CMake cache to see what was found or you could 
use the ldd command on one of the compiled libraries, point it at one of 
VTK's open gl rendering libs.

Burlen

On 12/17/2012 08:23 AM, Kevin Hackel wrote:
> Hi,
> I try to use Paraview 3.14 in parallel. My server has 48 CPUs and good 
> GPUs (I don’t know exactly which ones are on the server).
> Is it better to use Software or Hardware Rendering?
> Well, I’m not sure if my Paraview takes usage of the GPUs or only of 
> the CPUs. The server admin thinks that Paraview can’t really use the 
> GPUs of the server, but how can I find out if my Paraview uses 
> Software or Hardware Rendering?
> Thanks,
> Kevin
>
>
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