What is a good computer for running hugin?

[Brandan]

I am starting to do enough stitching that I am considering getting a computer just for stitching and running hugin. What stats should I be looking for to have a smooth fast experience? Any suggestions or thoughts are welcome.

[Brandan]

Let me expand on this. Is there a rule of thumb for how much RAM is needed to stitch a pano of a given size?

[David W. Jones]

On 03/10/2014 12:18 PM, Brandan wrote:
> Let me expand on this. Is there a rule of thumb for how much RAM is
> needed to stitch a pano of a given size?

I don't remember what memory consumption I had while stitching.

Once I decided to run cpfind on individual 6MP frames at full resolution
(not scaled down like it usually does). Processing a single 6MP frame
consumed just about 2GB of RAM.

My general rule-of-thumb for computers is ... get them with as much RAM
as they'll hold. Or proceed to add as much RAM as it'll hold. The more
RAM you have, the less chance your system will hit hard drive swap space
and REALLY slow down!

--
David W. Jones
gnome...@gmail.com
wandering the landscape of god
http://dancingtreefrog.com

[Brandan]

Any thoughts on less cores with a faster speed, or more cores with less speed per core? It seems to me, I have not checked that there are still some things hugin does that only use one core, so a faster dual core speed would be better than quad core with slower cores. *I hope the question makes sense as I really have little idea what I am talking about

[David W. Jones]

Hugin uses multiple cores when analyzing images. Enblend and enfuse use
only a single core.

I use Hugin on 2 machines. One has an AMD 2.8GHz Phenom III (4 core).
The laptop has a 4th gen 2.4GHz Intel i7 (4 core, 8 core with
hyperthreading). Both are running Debian Sid Linux. The laptop seems to
render images faster.

[Brandan]

I agree with David, get as much RAM as you can afford and your system will allow. As for the number of cores, I'm of the opinion that more cores are better, even if they're a little slower. Honestly, when you consider the speeds modern processors run at and the relatively small amount of work CPFind/Hugin/Enblend have to do, the CPU frequency doesn't matter that much. It would matter if you were doing calculations on humongous amounts of data that take hours or days to complete. Other things to consider a CPU, beyond the clock frequency, are: cache size (the more the better, the amount of cache is one feature that distinguishes Intel's server chips from their desktop chips), how much energy it consumes, whether integrated graphics is important to you (I'm not a big gamer, so having an external graphics card isn't very important to me), or overclocking, support for virtualization (I like to experiment with virtual machines, so this was important to me), and other nifty feature in some Intel chips such as wireless display (but you have to have an adapter for your tv), or vPro. Sorry, I probably just made the process of buying a CPU a little more difficult for you, didn't I?

Your OS will always be handling dozens of processes at a time, so the more cores your system has, the better the OS can distribute them (at least in theory :)

-Jeff
-------------------------------
I meant for my last message to be posted as a reply on the forum instead of directly to you. I clicked the wrong button, I guess. Would you mind posting it? It appears I don't have access to it anymore.

-Jeff

[RizThon]

I don't know what Hugin uses, but for image/video processing, GPUs are way faster than CPUs. So if you have an app that can make use of the power of the GPU, you may want to consider buying a better graphic card (or even cards) rather than paying for a better processor.

That's why people used to link several PS3 together: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

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[Lukas Jirkovsky]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 8:44 PM, David W. Jones <gnome...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hugin uses multiple cores when analyzing images. Enblend and enfuse use only
> a single core.

Enblend is multithreaded, too.

[David W. Jones]

Hugin support for using GPUs is marked "experimental". What does Hugin
use a GPU for, anyway?

[David W. Jones]

When Hugin is running it here, htop shows it using one core. Using
enblend 4.0-753b534c819d.

I know there's a version of enblend that supports multiple cores, but
it's not the stock one yet, is it?