We are seeing significant performance issues with ATI cards under Vista64 and OSX, using version 3.10.6.
Are there any known issues with ATI cards and RV? Any workarounds or suggestions?
hardware and driver details:
ATI Radeon HD 5870 with 1GB of GDDR5 memory
Windows Driver Version: 8.17.0010.1070
Mac Info:
Device ID: 0x6898
Revision ID: 0x0000
ROM Revision: 113-C0780C-194
EFI Driver Version: 01.00.436
Hey Jared,
We only support Nvidia cards on Windows and Linux. On OSX, we do support ATI cards because Apple writes their own OpenGL drivers and they do a good job of this. Since we do not test ATI cards on Windows, we don't really know what to expect in that case.
On OSX we do use ATI cards in our Macs and typically have gotten good performance. Can you describe the performance issues? You might want to experiment with the preferences for prefetch and use pixelbuffer objects. Those can have a big impact on performance depending on the hardware and the OS. The results are difficult to predict so the default prefs may not be the best match for your systems.
Cheers,
Seth
I have tried changing the prefetch and pixelbuffer object settings under OSX to no avail.
Lower resolution sequences seem to be fine and max out at ~100fps.
We see the performance hit when displaying our larger images, which are 1280x900 and really not that big.
Once RV loads a sequence of this resolution, any active RV instances slow to a crawl for playback. ~7fps.
Good to know about the Windows Nvidia only thing.
OK,
I'm not sure what the issue is. I just did a test on my laptop, a 4+ year old MacBook Pro with an ATI RadeonX1600 chip in it.
I was able to cache 2K x 1384 16 bit Exr files and play them at 30+ FPS.
I also tried some 2K full app DPX frames cached to 8 bit and got 40 fps, and cached to 16 bit and got ~28 fps. I always found that pretty impressive for an old, underpowered laptop.
Can you us more about the images or send us an example image? Not all cards accelerate all pixel formats so you can get unexpected results. Maybe we can figure out what is happening.
Cheers,
Seth
Seth,
We see this behavior loading half-float .exrs as well as 8bit .jpg files. I can try messing with the pixel bit-depth, but I don't think that's going to resolve the issue. I'll get back to you.
-jared
So. This issue is indeed only when running under Vista64 with an ATI video card. OSX seems to work fine with the same card.
For a number of reasons, it may not always be possible for us to have NVidia on windows workstations that need to run RV.
Is there a specific reason that ATI cards are not supported under Windows?
cheers,
Jared
Hey Jared,
The ATI GL drivers are not sufficient to handle all of the GL features that RV uses to accelerate the image and color pipeline, so, RV requires an Nvida card on Linux and Windows (as listed on the requirements page). Ironically, Apple develops their own GL drivers and they provide all the required support for RV on ATI cards.
Cheers,
Seth
Being game developers we have some contacts within ATI. Can you talk a bit about the specific GL features you need supported?
thanks,
Jared
Hi Jared,
Since this thread started, AMD/ADI drivers have greatly improved and RV seems to work fine in some cases now with these cards on windows, especially the FirePro cards. If you're still interested, can you tell me what cards you're using and if RV still underperforms on those cards ?
Thanks,
Alan