$W&*%^#$& up yours apple

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by masraum

Apple is in business and not marketing to every possible use case. Comparing your rig and needs to what Apple makes is a little silly.

Apples uber hi end users don't need to be marketed to, they already know they can kit out a ridiculous box.

But based on his needs Apple have been lacking as a solution ever since their spat with NVidia and no longer supporting the drivers for the cards.

CUDA is currently a requirement to run the majority of solutions out there to do what he does.

A couple of the big players support OpenCl but going NVidia is the smart move.

I've converted a couple of my older dual XEON MacPros (2008's) to Debian boxes and slapped gobs of RAM and NVidia GPU's in them and they performed quite respectfully compared to a modern box considering the age of the hardware.

Apple are interesting, AR is the next big but thing requires two things for mass market adoption.

Glasses and cheap efficient self service Content creation.

The glasses are on the horizon (actually available now really but would die on the vine without content) and Apple over the last couple of years have been slowly building out all the components that will allow the average Joe Shmoe to generate content.

If a mom and pop restaurant owner wants to put his menu items out there as AR experiences he can't afford $500 much less $100 per menu item to generate each piece of content.

They need to be able to create it themselves.

As of now Apple have built everything they need and they've done it without really tipping their hand to anyone. You have to have been paying attention and putting together the pieces that by themselves don't say much but when set next to each other are really a well thought out and well executed eco system.

You mention Apple in the modeling space and everyone just shrugs or looks at you sideways. They haven't been paying attention.

By the time the glasses drop you'll be able to self create quality content on a $700.00 Mac Mini that has all the software tools as part of the OS and it will run faster and be a better quality than what you can achieve using a $3-4k Windows PC with about the same amount of software costs plus a steep learning curve.

That is not an opinion based on noise, that is me working with their tools as they've become available to developers ahead of the general public.

If you don't have Apple stock today you better suck it up and get you sum.

[masraum]

Interesting.

[GH85Carrera]

I understand my system is a specialized computer for photogrammetry and that is not exactly and common thing. Games and photogrammetry use the cuda cores of the Nvidia graphics cards for a lot of the speed. We use Pix4D Pro with the large format camera option, for the projects to make orthophotos. It likes lots of CPU cores and RAM as well as the CUDA cores.

One of the computers I still use on occasion is 11 years old and built originally for Win 7. It is on Win 10 Pro now, and it is not a speed demon for sure. It still runs some old photogrammetry software that is several generations outdated, but it does a task just fine. To upgrade all that software to modern versions would be the cost of a nice Boxster S, and not really gain me much if any improvement. Win 10 runs very stable, just a bit slow compared to my main machine.

Part of the fun for me was using New Egg, and starting with a clean slate, and pick the motherboard, the CPU, the RAM, the M.2 drives, and then the 5 spinning drives for the 14 TB RAID5, the video cards, the case and additional fans and all the other bits. Assembling it, and making it come to life. Yea, I am a geek. It has been bulletproof and fast. It is cool to see it churn on a large project with a couple thousand images to mosaic into a 35 GB tif file.

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

I understand my system is a specialized computer for photogrammetry and that is not exactly and common thing. Games and photogrammetry use the cuda cores of the Nvidia graphics cards for a lot of the speed. We use Pix4D Pro with the large format camera option, for the projects to make orthophotos. It likes lots of CPU cores and RAM as well as the CUDA cores.

One of the computers I still use on occasion is 11 years old and built originally for Win 7. It is on Win 10 Pro now, and it is not a speed demon for sure. It still runs some old photogrammetry software that is several generations outdated, but it does a task just fine. To upgrade all that software to modern versions would be the cost of a nice Boxster S, and not really gain me much if any improvement. Win 10 runs very stable, just a bit slow compared to my main machine.

Part of the fun for me was using New Egg, and starting with a clean slate, and pick the motherboard, the CPU, the RAM, the M.2 drives, and then the 5 spinning drives for the 14 TB RAID5, the video cards, the case and additional fans and all the other bits. Assembling it, and making it come to life. Yea, I am a geek. It has been bulletproof and fast. It is cool to see it churn on a large project with a couple thousand images to mosaic into a 35 GB tif file.

Just for ****s n giggles you should try out Reality Captured. They have a PPI model so you only pay if you generate the model at the end and then it's based on megapixel count.

I know it's missing some things specific to your use case but it's stupid fast and you might find another use for your gear in reverse engineering small parts.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

I understand my system is a specialized computer for photogrammetry and that is not exactly and common thing. Games and photogrammetry use the cuda cores of the Nvidia graphics cards for a lot of the speed. We use Pix4D Pro with the large format camera option, for the projects to make orthophotos. It likes lots of CPU cores and RAM as well as the CUDA cores.

One of the computers I still use on occasion is 11 years old and built originally for Win 7. It is on Win 10 Pro now, and it is not a speed demon for sure. It still runs some old photogrammetry software that is several generations outdated, but it does a task just fine. To upgrade all that software to modern versions would be the cost of a nice Boxster S, and not really gain me much if any improvement. Win 10 runs very stable, just a bit slow compared to my main machine.

Part of the fun for me was using New Egg, and starting with a clean slate, and pick the motherboard, the CPU, the RAM, the M.2 drives, and then the 5 spinning drives for the 14 TB RAID5, the video cards, the case and additional fans and all the other bits. Assembling it, and making it come to life. Yea, I am a geek. It has been bulletproof and fast. It is cool to see it churn on a large project with a couple thousand images to mosaic into a 35 GB tif file.

I completely get it. Back in the days when I was poor, I did the same thing. I bought all of the parts and built the best machine that I could afford. It was great to get it running, and then confirm that it was probably faster than if I'd spent the same amount of money on something from someplace like Dell. I fairly certain that the budget for my whole PC was less than what you spent on one graphics card. Then over time, I could do tweaks/upgrades here and there to squeeze more life out of it.

My last 2 PCs have been off-the-shelf. Both have been all-in-one machines. The previous ran for many years, and as far as I know is still running for my son. I suspect the current one will continue to run for many years.

[GH85Carrera]

At my last job, the owner there like Dell computers, so we bought several. They were reliable, but never really try industry standard parts or drivers.

I honestly prefer to build my own system and ONLY add the software I want, and no bloat ware. Win 10 has more than enough garbage on it. I just wish they had a Win 10 Pro version that was zero social media, no games, nothing to do with cell phones, just work, and functional peer to peer file sharing over the local network.

But Microsoft cares about my specific needs almost as much as Apple.