Netherlands
Joined: Apr 8, 2022
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Where does SH3D use the graphics card?
I'm in the process of buying a new graphics card and am lost in what card would best serve SH3D. I don't care about gaming, but having a fast refreshing 3D window in SH3D is the most important. (photo/video rendering only as second.) I have searched all over the site including the forums but nowhere is stated what exactly is best for SH3D.
I work with huge projects (as in meters, not MB): huge terrrains, buildings, etc. The 3D window gets very slow when the walls get longer. I have a Ryzen7 processor, 64GB memory, 2TB SSD for Linux and programs, and 2 8TB disks for storage. Pretty good but useless until I can find the right video card for graphics.
So my questions are:
Where does SH3D use the CPU and where the GPU?
From what does SH3D profit the most: higher frequency ('speed') and/or more GPU memory? (Or something else?)
If I assign 32GB CPU memory to SH3D does it use it or is the max it can use something lower?
Is there a point where a faster card becomes overkill and doesn't produce better results?
France
Joined: Nov 7, 2005
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Re: Where does SH3D use the graphics card?
Where does SH3D use the CPU and where the GPU?
It mainly uses the CPU to render images at the two best quality levels (either with SunFlow or YafaRay rendering engines) and the GPU for the 3D view and the lower quality levels. But the CPU is also used to compute many other things like decoding 3D model files when you open a SH3D file, computing holes in the walls made by doors and windows, computing holes in the ground made by rooms, computing terrain vertices when you modify it... so it depends on how many doors and windows and how often you move them and walls, how often you edit a terrain, even how often you make levels appear or disappear, etc. It's also the CPU which orders the graphics card to draw every object at screen (3D models, walls, rooms...) so the more objects the computer has to draw at each frame, the less frames per second it will display during camera moves. A good example could be the SH3D file Sweet Home Company available in the tip about designing large buildings, where you'll easily see that the CPU is heavily used each time you select another level when the option Display selected level is active. I'm pretty sure that if some larger windows with multiple panes were used instead of all these individual window panes, changing levels would run faster (there would be less holes in walls to compute and a little less objects to draw).
From what does SH3D profit the most: higher frequency ('speed') and/or more GPU memory?
A higher frequency, unless you handle 3D models with many details in your designs.
If I assign 32GB CPU memory to SH3D does it use it or is the max it can use something lower?
Memory is mainly used by the program to store the 3D models and the texture images of your design. It stores also top view icons of the 3D models displayed in the plan which could take a lot of place according the Icon size chosen in preferences. And of course, memory is needed for the image you want to render, and a larger image will take more space in memory. Assigning a large maximum memory size to the program won't necessarily improve its performances that much, because beside the memory used by the items previously described, a large part is used to compute various things and this part is reused once a computing is finished. This is the task of Garbage Collector (GC) which is optimized to reuse unused memory and it doesn't take that much time. I would suggest to make run Sweet Home 3D with a task which uses a lot of memory for your tastes, then open About dialog box, wait a few seconds that GC frees as much memory as possible and check the number it shows after - 64 bit - (for example, 1.9 / 4 GB). This should give you the minimum -Xmx value for your usage (add 10% to 20% to avoid GC works too much).
Is there a point where a faster card becomes overkill and doesn't produce better results?
Actually, I don't know the best value should be added to the minimum -Xmx value to let the Garbage Collector work at its best. It could worth trying different -Xmx values. At the opposite, using much more memory than what is really required shouldn't make Sweet Home 3D run slower.
Hope this will help...
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D developer
