GPU PROCESSINGComing soon
Stream Capture does its heavy lifting — feature matching, dense depth, orthophoto projection — on the GPU through Vulkan, the vendor-neutral compute API. It runs on NVIDIA and AMD graphics, and if there is no usable GPU the same methods run on the CPU, only slower.
Stream Capture is in development and not released yet. At launch it will come in the same download as its sister program Stream Terrain; today's download contains Stream Terrain.
Matching features across hundreds of photos, estimating a depth for millions of pixels and projecting every photo onto the surface are massively parallel jobs. A GPU does them many times faster than a CPU, which is the difference between a map before you leave site and one tomorrow.
GPU photogrammetry is often tied to one vendor's toolkit. Stream Capture uses Vulkan compute instead, so the same code path serves NVIDIA and AMD cards.
Any GPU with a current Vulkan driver can run it. We cross-test the GPU code on an NVIDIA RTX laptop GPU and on an AMD Radeon integrated GPU, which has caught defects that one vendor's hardware alone would have hidden.
SIFT feature extraction and matching, the dense depth sweep with PatchMatch refinement, depth fusion and the orthophoto projection all run on the GPU.
Turn GPU acceleration off in Settings and every stage runs on the CPU with the same methods, only slower; the Vulkan context is not even opened, which is the way out of a faulty driver.
Windows resets a GPU that does not answer within about two seconds. Long dispatches are divided into bands that finish well inside that window, so a big project does not black out the screen.
The dense cloud uses an automatic or fixed RAM budget and works out of core in tiles, so large flights do not have to fit in memory.
Same photos and settings give the same products, byte for byte apart from time-stamp fields, so a change in the output means a change in the input.
Some does. Stream Capture does not: it uses Vulkan compute and runs on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. If you have neither, it falls back to the CPU.
No. It uses Vulkan compute, which is vendor-neutral.
It runs on integrated GPUs that support Vulkan; we test on an AMD Radeon integrated GPU. A discrete GPU will be faster on large projects.
Turn GPU acceleration off in Settings. Every stage then runs on the CPU with the same methods, which takes longer. If the 3D viewer cannot start for lack of a Vulkan driver, the products are still written to disk.
The dense stage works within a RAM budget you can leave on automatic or fix, and processes the cloud out of core in tiles.
Not at present. Stream Capture is a Windows desktop application.
Stream Capture is in development and not released yet. At launch it will come in the same download as its sister program Stream Terrain; today's download contains Stream Terrain.
About Stream Capture