GPU advice

[Dave Staughton]

Hi, I am new to photogrammetry and have 3DF Zephyr Lite.
I am using it to create models of archaeological objects and structures.

I am trying to quantify how much benefit there would be in buying a graphics card.
As it is a relatively costly upgrade, I want to be confident it is worth it.

My current system is:
AMD Ryzen 7 5700G with Radeon Graphics
CPU running at 4300 MHz
32 GB memory

I know only parts of the workflow from camera to textured model will use the GPU.
I am not expecting a recommendation for a specific card but wonder if there are particular benchmark measures I should look at to estimate performance.
Also, are we talking about typically halving total workflow time or much better than that.

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks.
Dave

[Andrea Alessi]

Hi Dave,

3DF Zephyr leverages CUDA, which is an nvidia propietary technology - right now your machine is unable to leverage that, so yes, we strongly recommend using a CUDA powered card. It will dramatically improve the processing time, even if you purchase a low end / older card.

You can find our benchmarking site here: https://benchmark.3dflow.net

You can run the benchmark directly in Zephyr - while benchmarks are always to be taken with a grain of salt as the size/type of the dataset/settings significantly change the running times, it can give you a broad idea of the type of speedup you'll be getting.

[Dave Staughton]

Thanks Andrea for the quick reply.
I will run the benchmark on my system just as soon as my current model completes!
Dave

[Dave Staughton]

OK, so I ran the benchmark with my current system and got 00:08:01
This seems pretty good.
Do I interpret this correctly compared to other benchmarks that I could approximately halve the processing time with a mid-range card like a 3070 series?
I was expecting a better potential than that.

Dave

[Andrea Alessi]

8 minutes is a long time for the benchmarks - it's not a very long time because it's just very few and small images. If you're running more images and at a bigger resolution I assume your datasets will take quite longer. 3070 is a great card and it will dramatically improve performances, even a lower card such as the 3060 or even older gen (2070 or so) will make a significant impact, probably halving(or more) processing times, depending on the settings/dataset. Go for it