Dear ParaView users & developers,
I am trying to reduce the time spent in performing generic 3D surface
rendering. A lot has been achieved by using ParaView driven by python scripting
already but actually I'd like to achieve more. At the time being, all rendering
is performed using CPU rendering with the MESA libraries and I have started
investigating if it could be worth performing the rendering using GPUs instead
of using N CPUs in parallel.
For the purpose of checking the GPU performance over CPUs, I have devised a
simple benchmark with a python script which drives the surface rendering. The
script performs the generation of 60 images and dumps them onto disk in JPEG
format. When performing this task, I have been tumbling upon the following
rendering times for the generation of the aforementioned 60 images, using
different versions of paraview on an "old" workstation, which is my guinea pig
for this benchmark:
Paraview 3.8.1
Paraview 3.10.1
Paraview 3.12.0
Paraview 3.14.1
138.12s
591.06s
592.53s
594.10s
What is striking is that the rendering time is 4 times less(!) with PV v3.8.1
than with all subsequent versions. I had already noticed something similar when
running MESA on dissimilar architectures, but I assumed that the culprit were
the MESA libraries used. Here, the HW and libraries are the same, so I am
enclined to believe that I am missing something here in the general rendering
settings which do not affect PV v3.8.1 but induce a big performance hit for all
PV versions above 3.10. Is anybody aware of rendering settings which could
induce such a performance difference?
BTW, for each rendering, a window opens with the OpenGL tag in the window title
bar, so I am quite sure that I am not using any SW rendering, all the more as
all the PV versions I have compiled have VTK_OPENGL_HAS_OSMESA set to off.
A few more details concerning the test I have been running:
- Workstation: Linux workstation with SuSE SLED 10
2 x Intel Xeon Dual core 5160 @ 3.00GHz
2 x NVIDIA Quadro FX3500 (NV71GL chipset)
- Paraview version 3.8.1, 3.10.1, 3.12.0 and 3.14.1 were compiled with OpenGL
support, Qt v4.6.x, python v2.7, OpenMPI v1.4.x using the GCC compiler v4.5.x.
- The script is run using pvpython (and not pvbatch) in order to force the
assignement of the graphics card:
pvserver -display localhost:0.0
Then the rendering script runs with pvpython from the command line. Within
the script, a Connect("localhost",11111) forces the connection to the pvserver
running on localhost.
Any suggestions welcome.
Best regards
Frank Albina.
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