Balancing performance with scenario realism

[dkidd3]

With the scenarios that are created in SimVista there is a trade off between how detailed the scenario can be and how well the simulation runs in real time. We have been trying to create a large scale world for a 20 minute scenario that includes two rural sections and one urban section. We are trying to make the world as realistic as possible but have found that including such high detail results in extremely slow runtime performance. We have several time sensor scripts that run between 10 and 30 Hz which contribute to the slow down, but our question is how much detail in the world can we get away with before we start losing performance.

Does anyone have any recommendations for ways to increase performance during runtime through SimVista? What about SimCreator?

Also, has anyone found a good method for gauging performance based on scenario detail beyond publishing the world testing the scenario? Any rules of thumb?

We have tossed around some of the following options:
1) Get rid of all the small objects (e.g., trees and fences) in our scenario
2) Save the scenario as a tile or save segments of the world as tiles
3) Adding RAM to our computers
4) Perhaps changing some of the rendering options in simCreator

Just to give everyone an idea about our set up:
We are running the simulation over a distributed network of 5 computers: 1 host channel, 3 computers running visual channels only, and 1 center channel that handles the bulk of the processing.

The center channel has a 3 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 2 GB of RAM, 512 MB NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT

[hstoner]

There are many things you can do to increase your performance.

The first option is to convert your VRML database into a flt database. This should dramatically increase your performance. Please email me and I'll make sure you get the correct tools to do this.

It may help your performance with removing the small objects. Each object is made up of polygons, and polygons take resources to render. So limiting the amount of polygons will help you. Perhaps consider using a tree wall rather than individual trees.

Adjusting some of the rendering options in SimCreator is also an option. You can increase the LOD factor, or change your far clipping plane. This will both help increase your performance, but you may notice more items 'popping'.

Saving the scenario off as its own tile will increase your performance when working inside of ISA. When developing scenarios the database should be its own tile and the behavior should be placed on that tile. Separating the two will decrease the time it takes to save and publish your database.

If I remember correctly you have a 7950 GT graphics card in your visual channels from 2007. This graphics card is somewhat 'old' now. You may consider upgrading your visual channels to a new graphics card like the 280 GTX. Most of your limitations are hardware, not software. If this is an option for you please email me and we can talk about next steps. I want to make sure that your power supply and cooling can handle the bigger card.

I am surprised to hear that running your different time sensors is slowing down your performance. I have not seen this before. Can you please email me more details about this and I will look into why this is occurring. It should not.