"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

Hi Mike, re: limiting threads - I guess it might be possible that the nVidia driver is trying to use some type of threading itself and that may be competing for cpu resources as well.

Can you look in your nVidia driver settings and see if there is a checkbox there named anything like "Threaded optimization" and what happens if you turn that off?

I think that probably MoI is able to use the cores more efficiently for its particular workload than what the driver was trying to do on the driver side alone.

- Michael

Hi adamio, great to see the new PDF import overhaul is working better for you now!

This also affects .AI format import as well, since new style (since Illustrator v9) .AI files are actually PDF files.

So anyway it should not be necessary anymore to save .AI files for transport to MoI using the older AI v8 format instead like previously.

- Michael

Here's a slightly different test. Dual quad core xeon.

2500 sphere grid. Filesize 11.8 mb

ms = no difference between v2, last beta and this beta.

Nvidia quadro card. Just tried to turn off thread optimization witgh no change in result.

Hi Mauro,

> MOI V3 20 JULY=1023 ms
>
> MOI V3 16 APRIL=1150 ms
>
>
>
> Intel core quad 9450-8 Gb RAM


Do you also have an nVidia card like Mike?

It looks like the old beta was using multiple cores on your machine already, but that's not from MoI so it must be something the driver is doing. But it's probably sapping resources away which MoI would able to use more effectively.

Can you look in your nVidia driver settings to see if there is any option like "Threaded optimization" which can be turned off? Do you see any change in MoI after that?

- Michael

Hi Burr,

> Nvidia quadro card. Just tried to turn off thread optimization witgh no change in result.

Hmmm, well that's disappointing!

Can you test what happens if you set DisplayThreadLimit=1 in MoI.ini (in the [View] section), does it then only show one actual core active when rotating the view or is the driver still using some itself then?

You also might try setting DisplayThreadLimit=6 or so and see if that produces some better results. It's possible with too many threads to actually have things degrade somewhat in areas where they need to be coordinated.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the new Beta!
I like the icons you used for deform tools

The enlarged pdf support will surely be handy.

Marc

Hmmm... no luck here either. :-/

I've tried it both with the "Global" setting as well as with one keyed for moi.exe.

I again tried different combos of thread levels.

It seems that "2" is still the fastest.
I also see four cores working, but that's because 2 cores are hyper-threaded to four.




And Triple Buffering seems to have no effect either way.

Setting a thread limit actually does limit the cpu's being used, but no real change... It appears maybe I see a 50ms change when going to something other than no limit, but I'm not sure.

I'll fool around a bit more with some of the other driver settings later. Any suggestions on those other than the thread optimization off?

Hi Mike,

> I also see four cores working, but that's because 2 cores are hyper-threaded to four.

Hmm but when you set the limit in MoI to 2 that should mean only 2 threads (so 2 entries in the task manager) are crunching away with possibly some amount on a third thread where it is talking to the driver on the main thread.

If you still see 4 cores going, that sounds like the driver is still using multiple threads itself despite that particular "Threaded optimization" setting being turned off. I was going to say try the global setting instead of the per-app one but I just saw that you tried that already.

Is it possible that there is a separate Direct3D and OpenGL sections for driver settings? You would want to be in the Direct3D one if so.

Otherwise, some generic advice might be to upgrade to the latest video driver if you are on an older version, maybe there was a problem at some point with it not paying attention to the threaded optimization setting...

- Michael

Hi Burr,

> I'll fool around a bit more with some of the other driver settings later. Any suggestions on
> those other than the thread optimization off?

Nope, I'd leave everything else other than "threaded optimization" to be at the defaults. Also make sure not to force anti-aliasing on with the driver settings or else it can mess up how selection works in MoI.

But also now that I see what your test file is like, a "sphere grid" is actually a particular kind of case since each sphere only has a single edge in it. So your test file happens to be heavy on surface drawing and light on edge drawing, and it's actually edge drawing that consumes the most CPU and also therefore has the most to benefit from the multi-core use as well.

On a more real model you would tend to have more than just one edge for each surface, especially with areas that have been cut and booleaned.

- Michael

Thanks,

I shall try to get in contact with my brother and see what he's got set up in this thing...
But I'll do some snooping myself to see what I can break. ;-)

Since the weekend is upon me, maybe I can concentrate on souping up the system that really needs it (at home.)
It's only got two cores. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. :-)

Fun, fun!

Hi Ditto - re: flickering on spheres, I haven't seen anything like that over here so far.

Can you please post a 3DM model file for a simple case where it is happening for you just so I can make sure I can have the same test case over here for looking at?

Also do you have any custom settings set under Options > View > Meshing parameters - are your settings there the default Mesh angle = 10 degrees and "Add detail to inflections" enabled?

- Michael