When will layout rendering gain multi-processor support. Rendering a sheet with a complex model can be an exhausting exercise. Looking at the activity monitor on my mac shows it to be running only on a single processor. It seems to me that while it might be a difficult software problem, users would benefit greatly from accelerating the task over what all our computers now have - more than one core.
Rendering several viewports at once would be great. Not to mention rendering viewports in the background while still having a responsive window to work in!
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Agreed. Right now, I’m working on a theater which has about 620 seats (all components), but I can’t render it as vector or hybrid due to spinning beachball, crashes and extended render time. I can as render the drawing as raster, but then my PDF output becomes huge and my drawing set taps out at 25megs instead of a few megs making transfer far more difficult. I’m just complaining but to make layout professional, it needs to act like a professional piece of software and be multi-processor aware.
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Totally with you guys here, rendering complex models and drawings in hybrid or vector really is an exhausting and frustrating excercise. The output can be beautiful but the journey certainly isn’t! Splitting viewports across cores makes total sense.
Yes you can do some work in raster and switch to hybrid at the end but if you are tracing to different layers over a complex model you just can’t see the detail, so you have to switch to check things. There is a lot of beachballing.
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This request is so logical…
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Nothing’s worse than getting a multi-page complex model all marked up then finding out Layout can’t actually render it in hybrid or vector mode.
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I haven’t had that experience for ages since I bought a nvidia Titan X. It seems a game GPU is overkill but having 12Gb Vram revealed to be as important for Layout as for rendering with Thea
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Interesting - do you mind opening up a GPU monitor and letting us know how much RAM is required for the larger Layout projects during the time you’re rendering hybrid/vector modes?
I checked and discovered Layout doesnt use very much GPU when doing hybrid mode with shadows. About 1GB ram. Still takes AGES (20mins) to render 1 model view in Hybrid (I have trees with 3d leaves on them…) but it seems to be the CPU (a single core) doing all the work.
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Isn’t the viewport openGL? Isn’t openGL performed in the GPU?
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I have no way of directly knowing GPU use except for temp. GPU temp seems normal but a single core of the cpu jumps to as attached - The image shows view port which I switched from raster to vector.
I’m using GPU-Z which has monitors for all sorts of functions.
In this shot, i’ve changed it from Raster to Hybrid Mode and clicked Render. This has been going for 10 mins so far.
GPU core clock and memory clock jump up and down from time to time - Im not quite sure what they tell me. Memory use is consistent at about 1100mb. “GPU load” never seems to get above 2%. Power consumption, temp, fan speed, etc are all consistent at near-idle levels.
CPU monitor shows 1 core is consistently used. (I have a i7-6950X @ 3.9ghz)
Disk and memory utilisation are low (i have dual SSDs and 64gb ram).
I’d love to know what hardware could be used to speed up LayOut (and potentially to make it more stable).
It’s true and strange. Nvidia has a little panel that displays what software is being used by the GPU and Layout is not listed even when regenerating all viewports from a very complex file.
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It seems clear that L.O. is using the CPU for rendering not unlike rendering programs. I know I have no idea what it would take to do, but it really should be reconfigured/re-written to render on multiple cores and threads like cinema 4D, vray, etc. I mean how many of us have machines that are limited to 1 core? When my rendering programs start a render, my i7 show 790% CPU usage. It would be very helpful if L.O did the same… Please Trimble!
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calculating geometry (aka vectors) is done by a single thread of the CPU… as in all 3D modelers on the market… GPU is rendering the OGL based display output (aka raster) only.
SU modeling/geometry/vector performance relies heavily on the single-thread performance of the CPU, mutliple cores or a lightning fast GPU still won’t help here… for the foreseeable future.
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Photorealistic rendering is a different thing from 3D modelling, but what little I know about computer technology makes me think that this might be a feasible idea. LayOut must be running a some kind of subset of SketchUp for each of its model viewports, and other multiwindow applications are already using multiple threads to make them draw faster.
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Thanks Anssi, whatever the specifics, not being able to render plans or sections in vector/hybrid is a serious issue for me.
LayOut’s performance is abysmal, and not only during rendering. Editing a simple text box can take, literally, several minutes. That’s minutes of 60 seconds each, not metaphorical minutes. Granted, if you zoom closely on that box the editing speeds up considerably, but for a software that, however delusionally, thinks of itself as professional, moving at the speed of frozen molasses and forcing users to rely on cockamamie workarounds to get things done is completely unacceptable. Turning this donkey into a workhorse should be Trimble’s top dev priority. As it is, it is an embarrassment.
On a positive note, I’ve found LayOut pretty stable in general. That’s probably because with a user experience so amateurish you would expect it to crash every 10 minutes, and when it does not you can’t help but be impressed.
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Totally on the money. I really think Trimble doesn’t care nor has the resources to develop the products in any meaningful way.
Fortunately you are incorrect about that.
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DaveR, honestly, cryptic comments are unhelpful. If you have information, please share it. If you have an opinion, please put it.