[vtkusers] debug volume rendering performance with volumepro1000

[Dr. Daniel James White PhD]

Hi Gerad,

Actually the support guys at rtvis told me it is a problem they have 
seen before ,
and it is loose winding on a power converter on the board which is 
vibrating.
There is no fan on the volumepro1000 board, but there is something that 
looks like a heat sink.
They are working on a fix apparently.

I hope

cheers
Dan

On 16 Jan 2004, at 14:29, Gerard Gorman wrote:

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> Hi Daniel
>
> I'd guess that the sound is the cooling fan on the graphic cards GPU.
> I'd open up the machine and make sure that the fan is working correctly
> - - this was a problem I ran into before when a dangling cable jammed 
> the
> fan on the graphics card...
>
> Cheers
> g
>
> Dr. Daniel James White PhD wrote:
> | Hi All,
> |
> | We have recently acquired a volumepro1000 volume graphics board to 
> speed
> | up the volume rendering of our large data sets in MayaVi,
> | which is a VTK application for data visualisation with a user 
> interface
> | written in python.
> |
> | Using vtkVolumeProMapper in place of vtkRayCastMapper or
> | vtkTextureMapper2D we do indeed see an increase in rendering 
> performance.
> | The raycastmapper is much slower than the volmepromapper, but the
> | TextureMapper2D is only 2 or three times slower.
> | We get frame rates between 10 and 1 frame per second using the
> | volmepromapper.
> | This board should give 30 fps!
> |
> | Our data sets are smaller in all 3 dimensions than the  512x512x512
> | limit that I believe the volumepro1000 board can handle with its on
> | board memory,  so the data should not be "paged" by the board.
> |
> | The board is in a short/33MHz PCI slot, not the recommended 
> long/66MHz
> | slot recommended.
> | Would this cause the slow performance? I think I saw that it might 
> only
> | give a 10% performance it, but I could be wrong.
> |
> | Otherwise, what is the best way of going about finding bottlenecks in
> | the VTK and hardware rendering pipeline?
> | How do I actually test the speed of each part of the pipeline to find
> | the bottleneck?
> |
> |
> | Possible places might be
> | 1 PCI bus between the processor and the volumepro1000 card,
> | 2 python,
> | 3 VTK c++,
> | 4 ATIRadeon8500 graphics card,
> |
> | One extra bit of information I have is due to the volume pro board
> | having a small defect which causes it to squeak every time the 
> display
> | is refreshed/redrawn. So I hear a noise for every frame update.
> | It kind of sounds like the volumepro1000 board is only rendering as 
> many
> | frames per second as the graphics card is displaying (or at least 
> doing
> | something every time the display updates..... the noise comes from a
> | power converter apparently).
> | Is this because that is the fastest frame rate the volumepro1000 can
> | handle under these conditions (it should be faster according the the
> | documentation), or is it that VTK is not sending the rendering
> | instructions to the volumepro1000 board fast enough, or something 
> else?
> |
> | My system is redhat linux 8, VTK and MayaVi from very recent CVS,
> | athalon 1.5GHz processor, ATIRadeon8500, volumepro1000 512MB in 33MHz
> | PCI slot with linux vli3 library.
> |
> | Any debugging suggestions very welcome!
> |
> | cheers
> |
> | Dan
> |
> | Dr. Daniel James White BSc. (Hons.) PhD
> | Cell Biology
> | Department of biological and environmental science
> | PO Box  35
> | University of Jyväskylä
> | Jyväskylä FIN 40014
> | Finland
> | +358 (0)14 260 4183 (work)
> | +358 (0)414740463 (mob)
> |
> | http://www.chalkie.org.uk
> | dan at chalkie.org.uk
> | white at cc.jyu.fi
> | _______________________________________________
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> |
>
>
> - --
> - ----------------------------------------------------------
> Gerard Gorman
> Applied Modelling and Computation Group
> Earth Science and Engineering
> Imperial College
> Prince Consort Road		Tel. 00 44 +207 594 9323
> London SW7 2BP			Fax. 00 44 +207 594 9321
> U.K.                    o~o A good slogan beats a good solution.
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Dr. Daniel James White BSc. (Hons.) PhD
Cell Biology
Department of biological and environmental science
PO Box  35
University of Jyväskylä
Jyväskylä FIN 40014
Finland
+358 (0)14 260 4183 (work)
+358 (0)414740463 (mob)

http://www.chalkie.org.uk
dan at chalkie.org.uk
white at cc.jyu.fi