[Paraview] Hardware suggestions for volume rendering
Burlen Loring
bloring at lbl.gov
Tue Mar 24 18:34:12 EDT 2015
I have the same issue with unstructured grids(not using the new opengl
work yet). A while back I wanted to volume render a large image dataset
after clipping it. The clip made it unstructured. This was on a few
hundered nodes on edison, I couldn't get the unstructured volume
rendering to work, it appeared to hang(took so long I couldn't tell) and
it crashed a few times as well(may have ran out of memory). I think I
tried a couple of the various mappers before I gave up. Would be nice to
have it working better.
On 3/24/2015 8:43 AM, Armin Wehrfritz wrote:
> Hey Kevin and Aashish,
>
> I found this discussion rather interesting, especially since I'm
> basically facing the same problem as Kevin.
>
> In almost all cases, we are dealing here with large unstructured grids
> (e.g. 12M cells) and the volume rendering is performance is extremely
> bad, not to say unusable, for these cases.
>
> I only tested it with ParaView 4.3.1 and older versions, i.e. with the
> old OpenGL algorithms, but the performance is barely influenced by the
> actual volume renderer (i.e. GPU vs. CPU based).
>
> For an unstructured grid the volume rendering seems to be CPU limited
> in any case, at least my CPU is at 100% for quite some time and the
> GPU load is negligible. ParaView's status bar indicates that it's busy
> with
> "OpenGLProjectedTetrahedraMapper".
>
> This can be easily reproduced with the wavelet source (with e.g. 125k
> points) and tessellation filter.
>
> So far I have resorted to resampling the data onto a structured grid.
> This has the clear drawback that a structured grid with the same
> resolution has about 70M grid points compared to the 12M points of the
> unstructured grid.
> The volume rendering performance of a 70M unstructured grid is however
> already decent with the old OpenGL algorithms.
>
> So is there a way to improve the rendering of unstructured grids to
> avoid the resampling?
>
> Best regards,
> Armin
>
>
>
>
> On 03/24/2015 04:48 PM, Aashish Chaudhary wrote:
>> Hey Kevin,
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 2:33 PM, Kevin Lau <kevin.d.lau at gmail.com
>> <mailto:kevin.d.lau at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> I see. Most of the performance improvements we have achieved is with GPU
>> RayCast Volume mapper (uses image data). If you can sample your data
>> into a strucuted grid then you will be able to use the new mapper.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> (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
>> <mailto: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 <mailto: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
>> <mailto:aashish.chaudhary at kitware.com>> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 2:43 PM, Kevin Lau
>> <kevin.d.lau at gmail.com <mailto: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
>> <mailto: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
>> <mailto: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/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> /| Aashish Chaudhary
>> | Technical Leader
>> | Kitware Inc.
>> /
>> /| http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> /| Aashish Chaudhary
>> | Technical Leader
>> | Kitware Inc.
>> /
>> /| http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> /| Aashish Chaudhary
>> | Technical Leader
>> | Kitware Inc.
>> /
>> /| http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html/
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Powered by www.kitware.com
>>
>> Visit other Kitware open-source projects at
>> http://www.kitware.com/opensource/opensource.html
>>
>> Please keep messages on-topic and check the ParaView Wiki at:
>> http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView
>>
>> Search the list archives at: http://markmail.org/search/?q=ParaView
>>
>> Follow this link to subscribe/unsubscribe:
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>>
> _______________________________________________
> Powered by www.kitware.com
>
> Visit other Kitware open-source projects at
> http://www.kitware.com/opensource/opensource.html
>
> Please keep messages on-topic and check the ParaView Wiki at:
> http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView
>
> Search the list archives at: http://markmail.org/search/?q=ParaView
>
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