quadro cards performance

[gbon]

Hi alls,



I was using a Quadro Fx1700 since few years and it has poor performances in
ProE.

I've recently bought a Quadro 4000 and I've just tested it.



It seems to be not very much faster for real time rendering within ProE
Wildfire 5 (Creo Elements 5).

Classical shading is a little bit much faster but it's not amazing.



So, can someone tell me if it's possible to get better and how ?

If not, I'm surprised to see price difference between 2 cards and Nvidia
classification (Mid range / high end).



Perhaps I've missed something but it seems that a classical Geforce in last
revision and at its best frequency would be better used by ProE than a
"professional card like Quadro" that has professional functions that seems
not to be used by PTC.



Don't know what sinking about those results.



GB

[BrentDrysdale]

Hi George,
I looked on CPU Benchmarks website under GPUs

[ChrisHanna]

ProE at this point in time does not take advantage of GPU based rendering and renders using the CPU(s). GPU based rendering is something that I've been told they are looking into.

[davehaigh]

Really? I can't believe that.

David Haigh

[A.DelNegro]

I don't believe this either. I have a system at home that I had the
'standard issue' video card in and it performed pretty poorly. It was
ok for small stuff but get 10+ parts and it didn't like it much. I
replaced the video card with a used Quadro FX 3450 and the issues went
away.



I'd be interested to see where this info comes from...



T

[Jim.Tierney]

When you talk render, I believe you are talking about photo render. Now
when it displays the model on the screen, it's using the GPU to do that.
It uses the CPU to generate the photo realistic rendering file... that
was my assumption.



Jim

[gchampoux]

Pro/E has supported GPU rendering (through OpenGL) for well over 20 years.
If you have a supported graphics card (such as any Quadro FX) the GPU is doing all the work when you pan/zoom/spin.
You can enable/disable the rendering method with the config.pro option: graphics.
This is handy to diagnose OpenGL or graphics card & driver issues.

However, what Pro/E cannot yet do is pass the tesselation task to the GPU.

Currently, Pro/E tesselates the model with the CPU, and then sends the triangle facets to the GPU for display.

Gerry Champoux
Williams International
Walled Lake, MI

In Reply to Chris Hanna:

ProE at this point in time does not take advantage of GPU based rendering and renders using the CPU(s). GPU based rendering is something that I've been told they are looking into.

[A.DelNegro]

Ok, missed that. I could see that I guess. I know when I use After
Effects & such, it is very demanding on the CPU.

[ChrisHanna]

Let me clarify, in ARX when you select Render Window it uses the CPU to render the image not the GPU. If you want to test this with an nVidia card go to addgadget.com and get the CPU Usage and GPU Meter widgets. Open something in the ARX module and select Render Window. Watch your CPU cores max out for a moment and the GPU usage barely twitch.

Selecting the Shaded display when modeling uses your GPU not CPU. I found this situation very strange because open source programs like Blender now have GPU based rendering as an option and ARX doesn't.