Tutorials and craphics card specifications

Raylectron (https://Raylectron.com) is a 3D rendering engine for Trimble Sketchup (https://sketchup.com)
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NPS
Posts: 68
Joined: Sun Aug 17, 2014 10:42 pm

Tutorials and craphics card specifications

Post by NPS »

Hi I am currently using RL v4 and am happy with it. A vast improvement over the previous versions, especially the UI. I had the GPU version which did not perform well on my computer under your advice I changed to the CPU version with better results. I have a state of the art computer here are the specs:

http://www.austin.net.au/austin-cad-pre ... tions=cart

What can I upgrade to use the GPU version and what are the advantages?

Next question where can I get a comprehensive manual as I want to get my head around the nuances of this program. My searches have not come up with much on v4 a few video tutes but not much else of any depth.


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Support
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Joined: Sun Oct 02, 2011 10:49 am

Re: Tutorials and craphics card specifications

Post by Support »

Hi,

The GPU version is only good for outdoor scenes, or for indoor scenes with either the sun turned on, or one maybe two artificial lights. The reason is because the GPU will lock up the PC while it's running (mouse will be very jumpy), it has different code than the CPU so it exit faster for the next loop. An example is, if you have 100 artificial lights, Raylectron need to query all of them in each loop (iteration) and it takes time, so on the GPU it will lock up the machine, with that many light, it could take 10 seconds or more. On the CPU it doesn't matter, it's multitask with the OS so it doesn't lock up the machine at all. Scenes like a car with an environment map will work great, mostly small scenes and with very few lights. Having 6GB of RAM on the video card with 3000+ stream processor is very very fast, but also very expensive.

For the CPU version, the code has been tuned for high end CPUs, such as the i7 and the Xeon. You can outperform the GPU by using dual i7 or Xeon processors, or better yet, the Xeon Phi (very expensive but super power here).

Which to use depend on your application. If you render landscape with hundreds or even thousands of trees, people etc. the CPU is the way to go as it is capable of doing instancing of those objects. It is also capable of rendering scenes with 10 million+ faces, that's a real burden for the GPU, especially with only 2GB of RAM on it. Texture size is also problematic on the GPU when using many big textures, you run out of GPU memory quickly. In short, big scenes with instances or a lot of lights you should use the CPU. For small scenes (2 million faces at most, maybe a little more) and very few lights, the GPU will work better in most cases but not always, it depend on how many stream processors your GPU has and how much GPU memory.

So what you should do is first install the GPU version for all the version of Sketchup you have installed (like v8 and 2014) and make sure to install it in a folder named other than the default, for example, C:\Program Files\RaylectronGPU is what I would use. Next, install the CPU version, again, for all versions of Sketchup, and install it using the default installation folder. Now you can run both, but because the CPU was last installed, it will default to the CPU. So when you export a scene, you can simply close the Raylectron CPU and run Raylectron GPU and load that model. You'll get to know what kind of model runs faster on the GPU by testing both on deferent models.

Another thing, if you create grass that is generated by Raylectron, you are very limited as to how many blades you can create for the GPU. 1 million is about it for the GPU (unless it has 6GB or memory). On the CPU, you can create 10 million grass blades and it'll be very fast.

As for a comprehensive manual, we are actually working on videos explaining everything in details with loads of examples, very very detailed. Until then (about one more week) you can ask me and I can explain to you in details. I hope this is not an inconvenience.

I hope the above was useful. If you need more clarification, please let me know.
Your support team.
https://SoftByteLabs.com
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