By nature, human beings don’t like waiting; so no matter what workstation you use it will never be fast enough. If you have a brand new machine it will feel faster for a while but over time you will probably notice it getting slower. This could be because you’ve got used to the speed but maybe because your system is getting furred up like a kitchen kettle.
To help give you some extra performance, either for loading bigger assemblies or in order to wait less time for your system to do something, Rob Jamieson, gives his top ten tips on how to get more performance out of your workstation through configuring hardware and tuning drivers.
About a month ago I wrote about the AMD “Reset Your Preconceptions” program for SolidWorks. In a nutshell, prominent SolidWorks users are being sent a FirePro card to try out in their everyday working environment with the only condition being that they share their experience - be it good, bad, or indifferent. Anna’s SolidMuse blog is the third review to come out.
Summary from SolidMuse: “So what is the bottom line after spending a few weeks with the ATI FirePro’s? I liked the cards, they worked well with my system and are definitely on par with the offerings from Nvidia.”
Perhaps more relevant: “After returning the FirePro’s to ATI, I went out and purchased my own FirePro V8700 “.
Again I need to give an acknowledgement to the FirePro team for running this campaign. It is real world testing with real world users all without any marketing spin control. It is an unusual level of transparency for a hardware company.
The video pretty much says it all in a short and sweet fashion: Over three times the visualization performance in CATIA by using the optimized VBO (Vertex Buffer Object) OpenGL driver support on the FirePro V5700. This comparison was captured live at the COE 2009 Technifair.
Last week I went down to Hollywood to check out my first hands-on demo of MachStudio Pro. I could go on and on for pages about MachStudio Pro. But to cut to the chase for this post, AMD has made a great find and a smart strategic partnership. The combination of FireGL/FirePro cards and MachStudio Pro are game changing and leaps and bounds ahead of anything else I have seen running on desktop hardware. For CG animation, Archviz, and Industrial design, 3D workflows will change.
Check out this short 4 sec video below. It is 99 frames, for a scene of 2.2 million polygons, rendered on a FireGL V8650 (2 GB framebuffer) at 1024 X 576. It rendered in a little under 45 sec. It includes real-time lighting, shadows, gels (the lighting on her face), and ambient occlusion. Be sure to watch it in HQ mode. To view the scene at the full quality at which it was rendered (i.e. without YouTube compression), download the .mp4 version.
Now what’s not really apparent about this video is how it was created - what was the workflow. Traditional 3D workflows are model and animate, followed by lighting, materials, fx. Once you reach the lighting stage, you do a setup, then a test render. Then you adjust. Then you do another test render and repeat until you our out of time or until it is ‘good enough’. Same is true for materials, fx, etc. Each change no matter how small requires setup, a test render and then final render.
MachStudio Pro running on a FireGL changes that workflow. The setup and test render are virtually simultaneous. And they happen to the whole scene, not to just a few frames. Moreover the final render is the exact same thing as the test render (just a larger viewport). This is hard to describe. Saying “real-time rendering” is just not meaningful or even accurate. So instead, let me just point out some of the things that really struck me during the making of the above video clip and as well as a few other projects (some of which are featured here.).
It’s like working in a 2D video editor
Scrub the timeline and watch the scene with fully-rendered FX as you watch the scene animate. It felt more like I was in a 2D video editor compositing, rather than a 3D product creating.
Work in scenes, not frames
When your setup, test render and final render are all the same thing - all simultaneous, you can work in scenes rather than being forced to work only on particular frames. (and not have to worry that the FX would not be replicated in other frames or that transitions and lighting would mismatch).
No test renders
In Maya or any other app with renderer, when you apply lighting, you try to base it on your experience with how various settings affect the image. Experimenting with full quality rendering is simply not practical time-wise - especially across an entire scene. So as a TD you become familiar with basic setting you know tend to work, and you stick with those. You setup the render (e.g. Mental Ray GI) and then you render. You can refine it but even minor tweaking can be tedious, especially for complex models and many frames. In MSP I could experiment. I could change anything related to lighting or FX and watch it impact the scene immediately. No setup and then render. As I setup I am rendering. This felt strange indeed - wonderful, but very strange.
Gels
I could apply gels that could focus on and/or follow a specific character or character fragments, and could animate these gels, apply soft shadows, etc. So for example, I could apply a gel over the face of a character looking out the window. The gel would simulate moving tree leaves casting shadows on the face in the moonlight. What made this so surreal is not only that I could change the properties of the gel and make decisions on quality simultaneously, but that I could scrub the timeline, and watch how the gel performed as the character animated.
Ambient Occlusion
I am still having a hard time believing what I saw. I could apply ambient occlusion in real time and adjust dynamically, for different objects. No setup and hit render. Just adjust and watch the impact - on the scene and animation, not just a frame.
Depth of field:
This was caught my attention repeatedly as I watched some of their artists develop projects for clients. I was watching them work on a scene for a Bionicles movie (a scene not just a frame) and as it was animating, I was watching depth of field effects. This is the kind of thing you see in a compositor with a 2D render, rather than in a live, fully interactive, 3D environment.
Subsurface scattering
The head-turner here was the real-time adjustment. Sure I can apply Mental Ray shaders in Maya. But the procedure is always adjust, preview, render - not adjust creatively, at the speed of your hands
Blooms and lenses
Not just blooms on a set of frames, but blooms that could be part of a whole scenes - like a real camera lens doing the filming - and all adjustable as you worked, without the adjust-preview-render. In fact you could control everything about the camera lens (HDR lenses, by the way)
Artistic lighting freedom
I am used to the concept of ray tracing to create physics accurate lighting. The scene can look great. But from an artistic perspective, that can actually be a limitation. Sometimes the effects you want are not something that can be duplicated in the real world. But with MSP you can “get beyond photon reality”. I could get creative: add a gleam to the eye, move the highlight higher on the hair, close the iris on the lens for the scene, but let the face glow, etc. Who ever thought you could actually art direct in 3D!
Obviously I’m only touching a very few points of what I saw or tried. But these were so mind-boggling to me, I thought they were worth the long blog post.
How does this actually work? I have little clue honestly. I know it is something to do with GPGPU computing and great use of FireGL/FirePro hardware. What struck me though, was when for each model I kept asking the number of polygons, the StudioGPU guys would look at me like “what kind of irrelevant question are you asking”. The polygon count was essentially a non-issue. Texture size and quantity was the bigger constraint.
What I do know is that AMD made a brilliant move here. They have been progressively demonstrating that they have a great product for CAD. Now they are poised to own the the DCC market by both creating optimized drivers for leading DCC apps, and by working with StudioGPU to change the very nature of the 3D workflow using the GPU.
COE 2009 was the 25th anniversary for this PLM conference & technifair and the AMD team was there showing off the new line of FirePro cards with drivers that have been specifically optimized for CATIA. They were also actively soliciting feedback from CATIA users. ConnectPress reported on AMD as well as some of the other interesting showings at the conference (PDF of the article).
At the event AMD also announced new OEM deals with Levano and Dell to include the FirePro line in their engineering and DCC workstations. Earlier this month they announced HP OEM deals.
For over a year now AMD's FireGL/FirePro team have been letting the professional 3D CAD and DCC users know that their new line of cards and drivers have undergone significant transformations with regard to quality, price and performance.
There are still some old preconceptions out there and the fight against past momentum continues. The FirePro team is taking the unusual step of working with a leading 3D CAD vendor - SolidWorks, and sending out workstations with FirePro accelerators to some of their more prominent users/bloggers. The users can evaluate the new cards in their own SolidWorks 2009 workflows relative to any other 3D graphics accelerators they have used.
No marketing spin, no "official" benchmarks to run, no pre-conditions for use. Just try out the card and use it in a way similar to how he or she would work normally. Then share their experience - be it good, bad, or indifferent.
The program will run for several months with 8 individuals in the SolidWorks community.
The first two SolidWorks gurus have already finished up their two weeks real-world use. You can read their evaluations here:
What I find compelling about this program is that the FirePro team is willing to put their cards on the line with real users in real workflows. They are also using this as an opportunity to actively gather feedback on any problems and improve further where necessary. Wish this kind of transparency was coming from every hardware company!
I will keep updating as I come across more posts from these SolidWorks users who are participating in this programs.
With the stated goal of assisting out-of-work engineers, both SolidWorks and Autodesk have announced programs to help engineers beef up their CAD skills.
The SolidWorks Engineering Stimulus Package provides a 90-day version of SolidWorks 3D CAD software, training materials a chance at certification, and job leads to any U.S. or Canadian resident seeking to develop, upgrade, or refresh 3D CAD skills that employers need.
The Autodesk Assistance Program offers 13 month access to student license of AutoCAD, Revit Architecture, Autodesk Inventor Professional, and AutoCAD Civil 3D, and includes online training and discounts on certification testing.
Last week HP unveiled (with much fanfare) their new Z-series workstation PC powered by Intel’s Nehalem Xeon processors. The rock-star moniker refers both to the zippy tech specs as well as to the pretty sexy exterior (for a professional workstation) having been designed by BMW Group Designworks. The Z800 can hold as much as 192GB of DDR3 memory, along with up to two Intel Xeon processors, with the 3.2GHz, quad-core W5580 being the top-of-the-line offering. When running at full power, HP claims the workstations can deliver performance increases of between 50 to 500 per cent, depending on the application. Obviously the graphics cards here make a huge difference and HP is offering the ATI FirePro V7750, as well as the ATI FirePro V3700 and ATI FirePro V5700 graphics accelerators as options. The new HP Z Workstations with FirePro graphics are already certified for more than 35 CAD/CAE and DCC apps such as SolidWorks 2009, 3ds Max 2009, and Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.
Desktop Engineering ran its own benchmarks on the FirePro v8700 (ulta high-end card with 800 stream processor, 1GB GDDR5 frame buffer, stereo, 2 DisplayPorts), and compared it to the previous top-of-the-line FireGL v8600. They basically confirmed ATI’s own SPECViewPerf benchmarks (refreshing to hear for performance numbers). Like the previous generation FireGL, the FirePro V8700 is CAD certified, has a 3-year repair/replacement warranty, features AutoDetect (optimizes the driver performance based on the user’s specific software application when running multiple programs simultaneously) and HDR. But the FirePro is smaller (but not small enough), significantly less power hungry, slightly faster than, the FireGL V8600/V8650, while costing significantly less (average US street price of $1,229).
Their conclusion “A board like the ATI FirePro V8700 is likely overkill for midrange CAD users. But for those who demand the utmost in performance, this board delivers significant speed at an affordable price.” (If you are one of those midrange CAD users and feel left out, check out the FirePro V7750 at $899 retail.)
OK - I stole the title directly from Engadget because it sums up the new ATI announcement for the FirePro V7750 pretty succinctly. The specs: 320 stream processing units, OpenGL 3 and Shader Model 4.1 support, a unified video decoder for accelerated H.264, AVC, VC-1 and MPEG-2 video formats, 1GB of GDDR3 frame-buffer memory, a 30-bit display pipeline with two DisplayPort outputs and and one Dual Link DVI port, which together generate a multi-monitor desktop of more than 5000 pixels wide. Since it is the pro-line of ATI cards, they have been certified for performance on all the big CAD/DCC application. And the “showstopper” news: the price at $899.
Everyone needs more realism and everyone is making bigger and more complex models. So the high performance/great price deal is pretty obvious. What I also find pretty interesting is the support for Stream Computing on the card, and that accelerated video encoding (and I assume decoding). This card aims at DCC and visualization pros as much as at the CAD community. Pretty much a no-brainer if you are looking for top performance and don’t want to stress out over price.
FireUser.com is a community resource for CAD, visualization, 3D, video and engineering professionals to learn about the latest acceleration and display technologies and news with a focus on the AMD FirePro workstation graphics line.
By nature, human beings don’t like waiting; so no matter what workstation you use it will never be fast enough. If you have a brand new machine it will feel faster for a while but over time you will probably notice it getting slower. This could be because you’ve got used to the speed but maybe because your system is getting furred up like a kitchen kettle.
About a month ago I 
Last week HP unveiled (with much fanfare) their new Z-series workstation PC powered by Intel’s Nehalem Xeon processors. The rock-star moniker refers both to the zippy tech specs as well as to the pretty sexy exterior (for a professional workstation) having been designed by 
OK - I stole the title directly from 
