VTK viewer and CPU usage

[Ben]

Dear All,

I tried the3D VTK viewer to visualize a resonable size confocal dataset (130MB). However, it looks the VTK viewer is not using the graphic card properly, doing all the calculation using the CPU, therefore beeing quite too slow to be used.

I am running Icy version Icy 1.6.0.1 on Windows 7, with the following configuration:
Memory: 8GB (6000MB set for Icy)
GPU: NVidia model NVS 5200M (96 cores with 1GB dedicated memory)

Is there a way to test if the VTK 3D player is able to use the graphic card? I tried the plugin OpenCL Lab but I couldn't have any result from it (pressed the play button, but got no output)

Best,
Benjamin

[Stephane]

Hello Benjamin,

Actually you can force to use the GPU rendering with VTK, just choose the "Raycaster (OpenGL)" mapper in the Canvas setting panel to enable it. We don't enable it by default as the GPU accelerated Raycaster has some limitations (as single channel rendering) and depending you graphics card it may not be much faster than software rendering.

Best,

- Stephane