[Paraview] Hardware suggestions for volume rendering

Fri Mar 20 14:33:08 EDT 2015

Dear Aashish,

Thanks for your reply.

(1)

We tried testing it with 2 different data sets of simulation data, one
medium sized and one very large:

Medium
Cells: 1309489
Points: 247984
Memory [MB]: 119.179
Geometry [MB]: 8.201

Very Large
Cells: 51937191
Points: 11019274
Memory [MB]: 4709.731
Geometry [MB]: 776.237

These datasets are unstructured grids (tetrahedral meshes) read into
ParaView using the Phasta data reader.

(2)

The OS used was Ubuntu

(3)

The graphics card was a NVIDIA Quatro K6000 running the NVIDIA drivers from
the Ubuntu Repos (v 331.113)

(4)

We configured ParaView using the default CMake options, changing VTK
_RENDERING_BACKEND=OpenGL2 and disabling all the plug-ins. These tests were
run in serial, as building with MPI was throwing errors.

(5)

We expected that the OpenGL2 version of ParaView would be able to volume
render faster than the standard OpenGL version. However the reported frame
rates were the same in both builds when clicking and dragging (~2 FPS).

This is a problem because we're mainly interested in visualising our data
and having users able to rotate the model and interact with it. At these
frame rates the response is a bit sluggish.

Also I've done serial test using an OpenGL2 build on Windows using an old
GeForce 8800 with the same medium sized data. On this machine the frame
rate was similar at around ~1.5 FPS.

(6)

ParaView was built by checking out the master from git. Sadly I'm not on
that test machine now, so I can't check the SHA

Many thanks for your help again.

Kevin

On 20 March 2015 at 10:33, Aashish Chaudhary <aashish.chaudhary at kitware.com>
wrote:

> Hey Kevin,
>
> On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 5:33 PM, Kevin Lau <kevin.d.lau at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Dear Aashish,
>>
>> Thanks for your reply, I've now managed to build ParaView from the Master
>> branch with VTK_RENDERING_BACKEND set to OpenGL2 and I have noticed a
>> visible difference in the rendering.
>>
>> However comparison of the rendering performance in the interactive mode
>> of builds with the standard OpenGL backend vs the OpenGL2 backend, both
>> show similar frame rates.
>>
>
> Depending on the card and features you are using you may not see a huge
> bump in performance. On some systems we have seen 300 times performance
> improvements and on others there were close specially when you have VSync
> on. Said that, can you provide more infromation on
>
> 1) Data size
> 2) OS
> 3) Graphics card
> 4) Features you have enabled?
> 5) You expectation and problem
> 6) What SHA of ParaView you are using?
>
> Are there other build options that I'm missing? Should I be building the
>> VTK libraries themselves?
>>
>
> Just make sure that you built from a clean state other than that you
> should be good.
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>> Many thanks,
>>
>> Kevin
>>
>>
>> On 3 March 2015 at 14:53, Aashish Chaudhary <
>> aashish.chaudhary at kitware.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 2:43 PM, Kevin Lau <kevin.d.lau at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dear Aashish,
>>>>
>>>> Thank you very much for your reply. The latest work you're doing on
>>>> volume rendering is very impressive.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>>
>>>>
>>>> In order to access the latest VTK rendering in ParaView would we have
>>>> to compile both the latest VTK and ParaView from source? Is it possible to
>>>> link ParaView to specific VTK builds?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Latest ParaView from source should be fine. Just make sure that you
>>> select VTK_RENDERING_BACKEND to OpenGL2
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Also do you know if it is preferential to have a single GPU (i.e. a
>>>> workstation graphics card) or multiple GPU (i.e. gaming graphics card) when
>>>> using ParaView?
>>>>
>>>
>>> If I remember correctly, we don't explicitly assign tasks to GPU in
>>> ParaView if running a single process. You can find more information here:
>>> http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Setting_up_a_ParaView_Server#Multiple_GPUs_Per_Node
>>>
>>> Hope it helps.
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Many thanks,
>>>>
>>>> Kevin
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 27 February 2015 at 08:15, Aashish Chaudhary <
>>>> aashish.chaudhary at kitware.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Dear Kevin,
>>>>>
>>>>> First, I would like to mention that we have been working hard to
>>>>> improve rendering in VTK that includes volume rendering as well. You may
>>>>> want to read this source article:
>>>>> http://www.kitware.com/source/home/post/154. Most of the changes
>>>>> related to this work is now available in VTK github repository in master
>>>>> branch. If you are targetting current VTK, I would suggest that any card
>>>>> that can support OpenGL2.1 or higher would be great. The higher the GPU
>>>>> memory the better. While these newer card will work with the previous
>>>>> version of volume rendering, it may not scale very well (in our testing
>>>>> that's what we have observed). Current the default in ParaView is OpenGL
>>>>> Volume Rendering but that is going to change sometime soon and once that
>>>>> happens you will have OpenGL2 backend for everything.
>>>>>
>>>>> Hope this helps.
>>>>> - Aashish
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 5:41 PM, Kevin Lau <kevin.d.lau at gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I'm looking to putting together a workstation to perform realtime
>>>>>> volume rendering of our simulation data.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Are there any particular GPU features I should look for?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If there are multiple GPUs will Paraview be able to take advantage of
>>>>>> each GPU for volume rendering?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Many thanks
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Kevin
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
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>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> *| Aashish Chaudhary | Technical Leader         | Kitware Inc.
>>>>>     *
>>>>> *| http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html
>>>>> <http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html>*
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *| Aashish Chaudhary | Technical Leader         | Kitware Inc.
>>>   *
>>> *| http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html
>>> <http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html>*
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
>
>
>
> *| Aashish Chaudhary | Technical Leader         | Kitware Inc.            *
> *| http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html
> <http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html>*
>
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