Thanks Michael G.! Hope to check it out sometime today!

Michael T.

Nice new icons transform !
But maybe the generic Deform must be different than the Flow ?

Cool the new extrude functions :)


Perfect the iso curves!

Hi Michael!

...some benchmarks:

Inventor import via IGES with ~250 objects, older INTEL Quad. Selected all objects, reset view and did some "serious" rotating..

mesh angle 10:

MOI 2: ~193-207ms
MoI 3.0 beta Apr: ~200-216ms
MOI 3.0 beta Jul: ~99-103ms

mesh angle 5:

MOI 2: ~460 ms
MOI 3.0 beta Jul: ~216ms

BOOOM!
I did check the CPU Usage History. All 4 Cores online..



Great work,
~ Marco

WOW PDF import has been totally overhauled INDEED that's a game changer, no more Round-trip :)

2.5


3.0

Here is my test opening a 100Mb filesize
Windows task manager show performance when loading the file

MOI V3 20 JULY=1023 ms

MOI V3 16 APRIL=1150 ms



Intel core quad 9450-8 Gb RAM

Thanks Michael ...
eric

Thanks Michael,
Awesome.
eric

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the beta :

Here's a first bench,



I'm using fraps and the autorotate script, bench time : 30 sec

MOI V3 April : Frames: 293 - Time: 30000ms - Avg: 9.767 - Min: 8 - Max: 13

MOI V3 July : Frames: 583 - Time: 30000ms - Avg: 19.433 - Min: 15 - Max: 22



Me happy :) ... will try to do some other test if I find some models here on my office computer.

Great stuff Michael!

Tapered Extrude works great! That feature alone will have a lot of fans especially the product design and Mech Eng guy's,
all we need now is a separate 'Draft' feature and that toolset will be complete ;)

I'll try out the new features soon, meanwhile here are the benchmarks I'm getting with my machine;

Machine Specs
My humble CPU: Core2 Duo E6750@2.66GHz
Graphics: Nvidia Quadro FX3500

Model
36063 Edges
13611 Faces

Benchmark Results
V2....210ms-235ms
V3....160ms-180ms
30% speed increase

V2(Display Hidden Lines).....330-350ms
V3(Display Hidden Lines).....230-250ms
40% speed increase

Cheers
~Danny~

MOI V3 April : Frames: 256 - Time: 30000ms - Avg: 8.533 - Min: 7 - Max: 9

MOI V3 July : Frames: 803 - Time: 30000ms - Avg: 26.767 - Min: 17 - Max: 31

Really nice result on this one !

MOI V3 April : Frames: 175 - Time: 30000ms - Avg: 5.833 - Min: 5 - Max: 7

MOI V3 July : Frames: 357 - Time: 30000ms - Avg: 11.900 - Min: 10 - Max: 13

Hi Michael,

Great job on the new tools!!!! =-D

I like the IsoParm features on both Project and Trim commands.
The Extrude to a point is good too because you can make instant pyramids.
The Taper (draft) function is going to be useful, but I found I was able to make ugly of it when the shape to extrude was too complex.
It's nice to have icons on the Flow features now.


Okay... I'm slightly miffed about the CPU improvement.
I guess you were right when you said that results would be dependent on what you were running.

I set up the older MoI and the new release with my "Boiler Watch" model. It has 1073 ojects. at 75 megs (file).
I tried it on my home PC earlier this morning and I really didn't notice any difference in speed (when heavily rotating the 3D view).
I have some kind of old NVidia with P4 Intel CPU... But I didn't expect much on that machine.

I thought I'd get better results at work, but I guess it could already be souped up somehow...

Here is my test with the "Boiler Watch":

My Work PC has these specs:
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz
RAM: 16.0 GB System: 64-bit
Vid card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560
CUDA Cores: 336
Graphic clock: 850 MHz
Processor clock: 1701 MHz
Mem clock: 2052 MHz 4104 MHz data rate

Nothing is overclocked as far as I know.

This is the Fraps log:

2012-07-20 11:11:07 - MoI (for older version)
Frames: 21 - Time: 5569ms - Avg: 3.771 - Min: 4 - Max: 7
Moi's counter is aprox: 160ms

2012-07-20 11:13:29 - MoI (for newer version)
Frames: 18 - Time: 4680ms - Avg: 3.846 - Min: 4 - Max: 7
Moi's counter is aprox: 160ms

This is a real negligible difference.

With the old version I could see at least one processor going, with another two at a lower rate.
With the new one all were cranking pretty well.

Note that my CPU is really a 4-core with hyper-threading to make eight.

So, am I'm I doing something wrong, or was there something originally with my system that could be gaining an advantage?
I do, however, notice a little less lag time when zooming in and out with the mouse's scroll wheel.






So, why am I not seeing any noticeable increase when the processor use chart begs to differ?
Could it be that Moi is now just eating more CPU for kicks? ;-)

"I certainly understand that you'd like a 64-bit version of MoI, but in order to do it would require a major churn in my development environment needing to switch to a new compiler and updating all support libraries and dealing with various compatibility issues from that. That's going to be very disruptive for me and so I don't think it's going to be likely to happen anytime too soon."


Congrats Michael on the upcoming updates with the speed improvements!


My only thoughts as to your quote above is I see this 64-bit issue similar to how everyone was begging for a MAC port.


You >resisted< in the beginning correctly stating that it would take a good amount of time for you to develop for the MAC not to mention supporting the dual platforms.

BUT you surprised us all when you came out with a MAC version - I even think it was cloudy that day until I saw your release post and the sun came out! :-P

I'm not even a MAC user but I was so happy for you cause you finally delivered what a lot of folks had been asking for.

So in the end it was totally worth the time and effort; you've now opened up your program to a whole new set of users which is obviously a great thing for your business.


I see this "64-bit issue" as another, if not the final ball and chain hanging around your neck which needs to be finally removed.

I can absolutely see, and believe you on how painful this conversion will be to do, but obviously you'll have to do it sooner or later so I'd advocate why not sooner?

Not so much all at once but perhaps just start by gathering up everything you'll need so if there are any missing pieces or road blocks, you'll find out now rather than at the point where you want to focus fully on the conversion.

If you can setup your environments and acquire your 64-bit libraries now in parallel to what you're doing, you'll be set for when you can focus in earnest, perhaps at the end of this v3 cycle?


You've just mentioned yourself that MOI with the new parallelism will tend to use more memory and at times, get near the 4-gig / 32-bit barrier so that along with more and more folks sitting with MOI on 64-bit machines just makes this "sore thumb" that much more painful to live with.


Again, I completely respect the pain involved with making the switch to 64-bit; all the new software required and the heavy testing that will be involved - almost like going back to a V1 (v1.5?) product more or less.



To summarize my feeling on this, just picture two little people sitting on your shoulders, one saying: "OUCH, don't do it Michael, ouch, ouch, ouch! Not now, too much pain, avoid it at all costs..."

The other is saying "Go ahead Michael, you know you have to do it sooner or later, might as well get it over with - 'Fight though the pain!...' (Gears of War reference there LOL) and get this weight off your shoulders..."


Now if you want to just spring the 64-bit update on us as a surprise like you did with the MAC version, by all means disregard this post LOL!
(My wife is like that - she ALWAYS wants to surprise me with stuff! At times I even have to ask multiple times to get an answer to "what's for dinner?" LOL!)

-Will

Wow...

Michael, Thanks by the way, for these new features. Keep up the good work!

Hi Mike,

> So, why am I not seeing any noticeable increase when the processor use chart begs to differ?
> Could it be that Moi is now just eating more CPU for kicks? ;-)

Well at least it's not particularly slower than before, that was actually a serious concern I had originally!

It could be possible that things are limited by some other factor, maybe bus speed? Do you know if your video card is for sure plugged into a PCI express x16 slot and not one that's running at some lower rate like x4 or lower? If that was the case then bus transfer speed might be the main bottleneck and having multiple CPUs going at the same time over the same bus would not do any good.

The other thing is that it's possible with the hyper-threading mechanism that it would be better for MoI to use only 4 threads on your particular machine instead of 8. I put in a setting in moi.ini that you can use to adjust the max number of threads that will be used, it's under [View]:

[View]
DisplayThreadLimit=4

Could you maybe try with the limit set to 3, 4, and 6 on different runs and see if that makes any difference?

It might be that I need to see if the machine is using the shared-resource "hyperthreading" mechanism and only use half as many threads when that's the case. There is some contention between the different threads and so having too many going where each one is not quite pulling as much individual weight as it could might not be good.

- Michael

That all kinda makes sense... (So there is a limit switch!) I'll try it out later.

It says "PCI Express x16 Gen2"

I haven't compared speed so far, but one thing is that I have lots of visual noise on round objects. A simple sphere, when rotated in the 3d viewport, flickers all over its surface. A cube does not show this behavior.

The attached screenshot caught 2 flickers. These beasts are really fast, and disappear easily.

Hi Ditto ...

I can't duplicate that on my machine. No flicker at all.

cheers,
eric

Here is what I got from just using MoI's counter: (the speeds are guessed averages)

Theads: Speed ms:

1 163 (4 cores active)
2 145 (6 cores active) What?
3 153 (7 cores active)
4 160 (8 cores active)
5 160 (8 cores active)
6 160 (8 cores active)
7 160 (8 cores active)
8 160 (8 cores active)

So Michael, it seems that the 2 thread setting is the way to go for now.
Now, I might try to figure out how to get Fraps to run a controlled timed test, but I hope this data is slightly useful.

Hi Will,

> I can absolutely see, and believe you on how painful this conversion will be to do, but
> obviously you'll have to do it sooner or later so I'd advocate why not sooner?

Well one factor is just basically fatigue - the comparison to the Mac version that you make is a good one, and the Mac version took a huge concentrated 6 month effort for me to produce. During that time other new feature development was totally suspended which is bad.

I don't think that I have enough energy to go through another similar slog right after finishing one up. And since it would involve no new modeling features, the end result would actually be of no benefit to a really large amount of users anyway...

So weighing in on the negative side there is a huge amount of work and sacrificing a bunch of feature work in order to do it, and on the positive side there is a benefit to only a smaller group of people... The cost/benefit analysis here tells me to hold off for now.

Then on top of that now that I have a Mac version I don't think that it would fly very well to make a 64-bit version for only one platform and not the other, and right now the mechanism that MoI uses for the Mac version does not support 64-bit Windows programs yet. So figuring out what to do about that only adds to the amount of work involved...

So it's definitely not looking like it will happen anytime soon, it is extremely unlikely that a 64-bit version will pop out as a kind of surprise like the Mac version sort of did.

Maybe it's possible sometime in the v5 timeframe. I am absolutely 100% certain that it won't happen for v3, the Mac version took up all the energy for such a large single-feature type effort for now. And I wouldn't mind doing an entire release without anything like that at all, so it might not happen for v4 either.

Some previous discussion here as well:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5172.5

It may be that the best way forward that would include the Mac as well would involve a major architecture change with a kind of internal 64-bit cross-compiled database engine that still had a 32-bit layer for UI. But I'm not entirely sure about that, it will require a lot of planning and design work to accomplish that.


> I can absolutely see, and believe you on how painful this conversion will be to do, but obviously
> you'll have to do it sooner or later so I'd advocate why not sooner?

Well, it's actually not obvious - certainly one valid strategy is to never do a 64-version at all, ever... I don't think that's probably what will happen, it will probably be more like sometime in the future when more of the modeling modeling features that take priority have been done. But in any case it is not coming up anytime very soon anyway.

If 64-bit-ness is a requirement for what you need to do, then it means that MoI is just not the right tool for the job currently, I have never shied away from telling people that MoI is not the right software for them when they are trying to do something outside of what it is good at.


- Michael