Entry level graphics card for point cloud processing

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Jason Warren
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Entry level graphics card for point cloud processing

Post by Jason Warren »

ASUS GTX760 4GB.jpg
A good friend of mine emailed me last week on the topic of workstation graphics cards and he is looking to replace his Quadro 5800 with an ASUS GTX 760, which now has 4Gb of GDDR5. It looks cheap at £170, and wondered if this would make a good entry level card for working with point clouds inside AutoCAD?

I did use Nvidia based cards myself, having had a couple of Quadro`s that overheated and burnt out I`m now using an AMD R7 card.
I`m always looking to speed up processing times and would like to hear anyone`s comments on the AMD R9 290X.
GX-269-MS_100692_800.jpg
Specification
Radeon R9 290X
- Backplate included: Yes
- GPU: Hawaii XT
- Litecoin Hash Rate: 850-1000
- Stream Processors: 2816
- ROPS: 64
- Core Speed: 1040MHz
- Memory Speed: 5000Mhz
- Memory interface: 512-Bit
- Memory capacity: 8192MB GDDR5
- Cooling: MSI Twin FrozR Gaming Cooling
- PCI-Express X16 lane required
- 600W or greater PSU required
- Power Connectors: 8-pin + 6-pin required
- Display Outputs: 2x Dual Link DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort
- Warranty: 3yr

Features
- DirectX 11.2 Support
- Open GL 4.2 Support
- Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio support
- Crossfire Support upto 4-way: Native software crossfire (No bridge required)
- Gaming @ 4k Resolutions (UltraHD)
- Synergy with next-gen game consoles (Mantle)
- Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture - optimized from previous generation products

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprod ... =GX-269-MS

The spec looks great, and affordable at around £300.00, but at the end of the day can point cloud processing software make good use of all the tech on these cards?
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Re: Entry level graphics card for point cloud processing

Post by dtmcnamara »

What programs is he using?
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Re: Entry level graphics card for point cloud processing

Post by MarcinL »

David draw attention at right matter, that everything is depend on which software you want to use with this hardware. I am working with Bentley microstation, and I didn't seen any difference in performance using dedicated and integrated graphic (intel 4600) cards. The most important issue in this case is connected with CPU power.
My observation was confirmed by Bentley support team once I've asked them for information in this issue.

"We’ve compared timings of various point cloud data sets on different configurations, and it doesn’t look like the choice of graphics hardware makes much difference in the overall performance. The most important criteria are a good fast CPU and adequate system memory.

In general, most architectures with on-board graphics have weaker graphics capability and don’t perform as well as separate graphics cards for most MicroStation applications. However, the tight integration between CPU and GPU of these architectures, where both can access the same memory, is advantageous for point cloud display, where we have large amounts of data but relatively little computation. So, while higher end AMD or NVIDIA graphics hardware is generally best for most MicroStation applications, the Intel on-board graphics (for example, an i5 or i7 core with Intel HD4000 or better graphics) performs very well for point cloud display"
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Re: Entry level graphics card for point cloud processing

Post by JohnT2 »

It's interesting that you had a bad experience with the Quadro cards... In 2012, we bought 4 Dell M6600s with the FirePro M8900... the machines worked great, for a time.

One by one, they have all gone down with flat-out video card failures while their Quadro counterparts (purchased both before and after) work just fine.

If we had all sorts of time and money, we would certainly test every promising card, but unfortunately since our M6600 die-off, we've had to avoid the AMD video cards out of prudence.

As an aside: Autodesk + Nvidia always seem to play nicer than Autodesk + AMD...

...but like anything on the internet and based on a statistically small selection set: YMMV
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Re: Entry level graphics card for point cloud processing

Post by dtmcnamara »

One other thing to note is that some features/technologies are not present in Nvidia cards that are in Quadro/Firepro cards, the biggest one bring quad buffered openGL stereo technology. You might not need this depending on the applications your running, but if you do you will need to run at least one quadro card to enable it.

I run a single Quadro K2000 and 3 GTX780 cards in order to enable features I need and still get massive amounts of render power for lower cost.
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Re: Entry level graphics card for point cloud processing

Post by hypsometric »

SSDs seem to be determining pointcloud performance recently :(. But as dense meshes become the norm I'm hoping our investments payoff.
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