Building the best system for PTGui stitching

[DennisS]

Good morning,

I thought I would start a new thread instead of highjacking an existing one.

In another thread Joost brought up a point that if you have two video cards in your system, PTGui uses only one.  I can understand that since there are software titles (games) that do not improve when you add more video cards.  Other games benefit greatly from multiple video cards while others do not.

I have some questions about the individual components that contribute to the stitching time.

CPU:

I have been using PTGui since about 2008 or so.  I have had a few computers along the way.  Software development is just one of the many things I currently do in the computer field.  I have found that  i7 class CPU's are great for games while XEON cpu's are great for number crunching.  When I am doing long running data conversions for customers, I put the data on my 3.4 ghz dual quad core XEON machine.  My i7-6700k @ 4.7 ghz just cannot keep up with my XEON 3.4.  Doom runs great on the I7 but is kind of a dog on the XEON system.

Does a XEON perform better at stitching than an I7 class CPU?

Video card:

If a 10xx class card is so much faster than a 9xx card, would the stitching times improve by upgrading to a 10xx class card?  If I had a 980 card here I could easily answer that question.  Time a stitch, swap out cards, time the stitch.  Anyone got an extra 980 ti?

Hard drive:

I would imagine there comes a time when the hard drive system becomes the bottleneck.  At what point along the video card upgrade path does the hard drive begin to become the major bottleneck?  All things being equal, is there a point where your money would be better spent on your hard drive system?

Memory speed:

Anyone know if this is an issue?

It was not until Doom was released that I put together a top end gaming rig.  Up until then all I did was business applications on my XEON rig.  I would suppose that building a new I7 rig accounts for the mere seconds it now takes to stitch.  I wonder if I replaced the CPU with a XEON if stitching times would come done even more.  I know that the gaming experience would suffer.

Is there a sort of "upgrade this first, then upgrade this next" sort of check list?  I know that with bicycles, you always upgrade the wheels first.  That is where  you will get the most "bang for your buck".

Dennis

[gj360]

Well, too bad nobody answered this two year old thread.  I have similar questions, one is:  how much VRAM should my video card have for optimum performance?  2 GB?  4 GB?  Is 6 GB better?  Is 8 GB overkill?

Another question is:  is cpu clock speed the best determinant for how fast PTGui will stitch or is the number of cpu cores more important?  I know that Lightroom favors clock speed and doesn't use more than 4 cores very efficiently.

[PTGui Support]

Hi,

There's some information in 3.11:
https://www.ptgui.com/support.html#3_11

If you have enough VRAM, the panorama can be stitched and blended
entirely on the GPU. If the panorama is larger, data will be moved on
and off the GPU during stitching and blending. But this is done in
parallel to the image processing, so it does not necessarily slow down
stitching too much.

With GPU acceleration enabled, the CPU is only used for image decoding
and encoding (e.g. LZW compression with TIFF). This is done in parallel
while the GPU is stitching the panorama. With a good GPU usually the CPU
is not a bottleneck.

For aligning the panorama the GPU is not used, so this is where a fast
CPU makes a difference. The CPU's multithreaded performance is what you
should be looking at.

Especially for larger gigapixel panoramas, be sure to have plenty of RAM
and only use SSDs for source files, output and temporary storage.

The overall performance depends on the entire combination of components
and the kind of panoramas being stitched, it's impossible to predict
this beforehand. You would need to benchmark an entire system with your
usual kind of stitching projects.

Hope this helps!

Kind regards,

Joost Nieuwenhuijse
www.ptgui.com

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[gj360]

How would I know if the VRAM on my video card is being used as much as it could?  I just switched out from a 2 GB card to a 4 GB card on my six core desktop and it's not like the whole process seemed speedier.  During Aligning and Stitching I had Task Manager open so I could see how much the cpu and video card were working.  The cpu was smoking along at 3.9 GHz but the video card usage ranged from 0 to at most 11 %.  Is Task Manager telling me how much VRAM is being used to just overall usage, like powering my monitor.  I'm used to my 360 panos stitching in about 7 seconds (20 images shot with a circular fisheye) so over 2 minutes stitching 48 images from a multi-row/8 column set of images seems like a lifetime.

[PTGui Support]

I don't think it's possible to monitor VRAM usage, but you can't change
it anyway. You can only tell PTGui to use no more than a certain maximum.

If you think it's running too slow, make your project available and we
can compare the timing on different machines.

Kind regards,

Joost Nieuwenhuijse
www.ptgui.com

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