Hardware Articles

Windows 10 Security Patch Slowed Intel Core i9 9900K in Pix4D, Metashape, & RealityCapture

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Over the last couple of years, several new vulnerabilities have been found in modern microprocessor architectures. Many of these have been related to speculative execution techniques used across most of Intel’s product line, and a patch was released for Windows 10 last week which was intended to address some of those weaknesses. Unfortunately, it has also reduced performance in some applications – which this article will demonstrate by comparing processing speed in three photogrammetry programs before and after the update.

Pix4D Benchmark

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Here at Puget Systems, we have put together a benchmark utility for Pix4D which measures system performance for photogrammetry by running two small projects – a 3D Model and a 3D Map – and tracking the time each step takes to process. This benchmark is freely available to download, though running it requires a valid installation of Pix4D.

Pix4D 4.3: Intel Core i9 9990XE Performance

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Pix4D is an advanced photogrammetry application, suited to a wide range of uses, with a focus on handling images captured by drone cameras. Processing of those images into point clouds and 3D meshes/textures is time-consuming, heavily using a computer’s CPU and GPU. Both core count and clock speed play a role in Pix4D performance, so when Intel released their new Core i9 9990XE with very high clock speeds and a respectable number of cores (14, plus Hyperthreading) this seemed like a good application to test on it.

Testing Dynamic Local Mode on AMD Threadripper 2970WX – Photogrammetry

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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.

Pix4D 4.3 GPU Comparison: GeForce RTX 2070, 2080, and 2080 Ti

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Pix4D is an advanced photogrammetry application, suited to a wide range of uses, with a focus on handling images captured by drone cameras. Processing of those images into point clouds and 3D meshes / textures is time-consuming, heavily using a computer’s CPU and GPU. A new version, 4.3, was released recently – so we have tested multiple projects across the new GeForce RTX series of video cards, as well as the previous generation, to see which graphics card performs the best.

Pix4D 4.3 CPU Comparison: Intel 9th Gen Core & X-series vs AMD Ryzen & Threadripper

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Pix4D is an advanced photogrammetry application, suited to wide range of uses, with a focus on handling images captured by drone cameras. Processing of those images into point clouds and 3D meshes / textures is time consuming, heavily using a computer’s CPU and GPU. A new version, 4.3, was released recently – so we have tested multiple projects across a wide range of CPUs to see what hardware performs the best.

Pix4D 4.3 Multi-GPU Scaling and NVLink

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Pix4D is an advanced photogrammetry application, suited to a wide range of uses, with a focus on handling images captured by drone cameras. Processing of those images into point clouds and 3D meshes/textures is time-consuming, heavily using a computer’s CPU and GPU. In this article, we are looking at whether multiple GPUs improve Pix4D performance and if NVLink has any impact.

Pix4D 4.3 vs 4.2 Performance Analysis

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Pix4D is an advanced photogrammetry application, suited to wide range of uses, with a focus on handling images captured by drone cameras. Processing of those images into point clouds and 3D meshes / textures is time consuming, heavily using a computer’s CPU and GPU. A new version, 4.3, was released recently – so we are taking a look at performance of the previous version versus this one to see if there have been any improvements.

Puget Systems Benchmark Tool for Pix4D

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Want to see how your system stacks up to the latest hardware? Download our free, public Pix4D benchmark tool which will walk you through a couple of basic projects and display the calculation times. We’ve also included a video walkthrough, showing how to use this tool, and some comparison results from recent workstations built here at Puget Systems.

Pix4D GPU Comparison: GeForce, Titan, and Quadro

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Pix4D is an advanced photogrammetry application, suited to wide range of uses, with a focus on handling images captured by drone cameras. Processing of those images into point clouds and 3D meshes / textures utilizes the video card (GPU) in a workstation, but how much impact do different cards make on overall performance?