Hardware Articles

Testing Dynamic Local Mode on AMD Threadripper 2970WX – Photogrammetry

Posted on by William George

Dynamic Local Mode is a new feature on AMD’s biggest Threadripper processors. These CPUs have cores grouped internally, some with direct access to system memory and some which have to communicate through those other cores to access data in memory. DLM prioritizes running code on the cores which have a direct line to the memory, helping to improve performance in situations where not all of the cores are in use. How does that translate to real-world workloads, though? Let’s take a look at two photogrammetry applications and see how the 24-core 2970WX behaves with this feature on and off.

Agisoft PhotoScan 1.4.3: GeForce RTX 2080 & 2080 Ti Comparison

Posted on by William George

PhotoScan makes use of the video cards in a computer to assist with the computation of certain steps. As such, the model of video card used can have an impact on the amount of time those steps take. In this article, we take a look at the GeForce RTX 2000-series – based on NVIDIA’s Turing GPU architecture – to see how they compare to each other.

Agisoft PhotoScan 1.4.3: Intel Core i7 9700K & i9 9900K Performance

Posted on by William George

PhotoScan makes heavy use of the central processor (CPU) in a computer to run many of the calculations involved in turning still images into a 3D model or map. Different steps in that process utilize the CPU in various ways, though, with both clock speed and core count coming into play. Let’s see how the new 9th Gen Intel Core processors perform compared to existing Intel and AMD chips.

Agisoft PhotoScan 1.4.1 NVIDIA GeForce vs AMD Radeon Vega

Posted on by William George

PhotoScan makes use of the video cards in a computer to assist with the computation of certain steps. As such, the model of video card used can have an impact on the amount of time those steps take. In this article, we take a look at AMD’s Radeon line – including the Vega 64 and 56 – and see how they stack up to NVIDIA’s GeForce 1000-series.

Agisoft PhotoScan 1.4.1 – Apple iMac Pro and Mac Pro vs PC Workstations

Posted on by William George

PhotoScan makes heavy use of both the central processors (CPUs) in a computer and the video cards (GPUs) to run many of the calculations involved in turning still images into a 3D model or map. Agisoft, the makers of PhotoScan, have versions available for both Windows and macOS – so let’s take a look at how these two, competing computer platforms compare.

Agisoft PhotoScan 1.4.1 – Xeon Scalable CPU Performance and GPU Scaling

Posted on by William George

PhotoScan makes heavy use of both the central processors (CPUs) in a computer and the video cards (GPUs) to run many of the calculations involved in turning still images into a 3D model or map. Intel’s new Xeon Scalable processors offer configurations with dozens of CPU cores, as well as the ability to support multiple GPUs – so let’s see how they perform in PhotoScan.

Agisoft PhotoScan 1.4.1 – CPU Performance Comparison

Posted on by William George

PhotoScan makes heavy use of the central processor (CPU) in a computer to run many of the calculations involved in turning still images into a 3D model or map. Different steps in that process utilize the CPU in various ways, though, so we are looking at how several Intel and AMD processors compare in this application.

Agisoft PhotoScan 1.4.1 – CPU and GPU Preferences

Posted on by William George

PhotoScan makes use of both the CPU and GPUs (video cards) in a computer, during different steps of the photogrammetry workflow. One of the configuration options within this program also allows the CPU to be utilized during steps that are primarily performed on the GPU – and it is enabled by default. However, we have found in our testing that this option usually hampers performance more than it helps!

Agisoft PhotoScan 1.4.1 – Multi GPU Scaling

Posted on by William George

PhotoScan makes use of the video cards in a computer to assist with the computation of certain steps. As such, both the model of video card used and the number of GPUs present in a system can have an impact on the amount of time those steps take. In this article, we take a look at how multiple GeForce GTX 1080 Ti cards scale in performance across a few different CPU platforms.

Agisoft PhotoScan 1.4.1 – GeForce GPU Comparison

Posted on by William George

PhotoScan makes use of the video cards in a computer to assist with the computation of certain steps. As such, the model of video card used can have an impact on the amount of time those steps take. In this article, we take a look at the GeForce 1000-series – based on NVIDIA’s Pascal GPU architecture – to see how they compare to each other.