ASP Beta 1.1.0.28 - First impressions

[Zarastro]

First, OpenCL support was readily detected on Linux with NVidia drivers 304.51; however, I'm using just a lowly GT 620 card. Interestingly, when using hugin (which has engines that can use NVidia's CUDA) I see a noticeable improvement over CPU-based processing. I may install another NVidia card I have here (8500GS) to see how it does. Here are the processing times for a batch of 50 pictures from Sony A700 rendered to 12 MP in the largest dimension.

1. OpenCL off: 1,51s/image
2. OpenCL on, lowest setting: 1,53s/image
3. OpenCL on, 2nd setting: didn't complete
4. OpenCL on, 3rd setting: 2,5s/image
5. OpenCL on, 4rd setting: 4,78s/image


This shows me that, for the current iteration of ASP (1.1.0.28), OpenCL doesn't do much for me; actually disabling OpenCL gives me the highest performance and stability, since with the second level of acceleration the ASP batch queue gets stuck, and system activity drops as if ASP wasn't running. However the interface is responsive and I can close it gracefully, but even in this case the program goes berserk and segfaults immediately if I try to zoom the image, for example.

As for image quality, I really don't see any improvements. The demosaicing problems are always present on files from the A700; moreover, ASP with its defaults settings renders them more darker and with much more saturation than Sony''s IDC v4. And finally, to match IDC's sharpening with its defalts, I've found that one must turn the Sharpening slider up to 300. Below are comparative shots at 200%.

IDC with manual DRO in 60%, other settings untouched:



ASP configured to match IDC's output: Fill light, 1.30; Saturation, -60; Sharpening, 300 (!):



Moreover, even if there's not much of the sky to see in the pictures, it's possible to distinguish between the processing of Sony's IDC and ASP; in the ASP image, it's possible to see color blotches and artifacts which are non-existent in the IDC image.

In short: I will probably uninstall this version (since OpenCL is making no difference for me) and wait for the next beta to see if things will improve or not.

[Dutchmm]

Performance (batch of 26 from Sony SLT-A55 rendered full size)
AS Previous version: 2.03s per photo
Open GL on minimum: 2.44s /photo
Open GL any other: Did Not Finish
Open GL OFF: 1.93s /photo

So, better even for those of us with ancient graphics cards (you think your GT620 is lowly? I am still running a passively cooled 8600 GT!), even if we can't take advantage of the openCL.

Zoom doesn't seem to crash AS on my Ubuntu 12.04 LTS system with the NVidia 304.43

I need to recalibrate my monitor for the new drivers before I give any view on the IQ impact, but I don't think it's very useful to compare the settings required on AS to IDC. More users would be interested in whether they need to re-work their defaults to get the same results as with whichever version of AS they had previously been using.

[TheDude]

Opencl barely influences processing speed on my machine (intel i7 3770, 32G ram, passively cooled ATI HD 5450, Linux mint 13 maya, kde desktop). This is probably due to my low end gpu. I guess only certain operations are performed on the gpu, which might turn into a bottleneck if the cpu is significantly faster. This accords with the observation, that strong gpu utilization has a slightly negative influence.
However, processing speed is also nice for CPU only processing. Average speed for more or less trivial processing on my machine is 0.4s/photo. More complex processing required approximately 1 to 1.5 s/photo without Opencl.

ASP beta did not crash yet. Neither when zooming, nor at any opencl utilization setting.

The only bug I noteiced yet, affects the color correction tool. It seems I cannot always select colors correctly in the image. E.g. I selected the green of a sweater in a portrait. The selected color was displayed correctly in the color tool, but changing the hue, actually influenced the skin tones

[Dutchmm]

The only bug I noticed yet, affects the color correction tool. It seems I cannot always select colors correctly in the image. E.g. I selected the green of a sweater in a portrait. The selected color was displayed correctly in the color tool, but changing the hue, actually influenced the skin tones

Are you sure this is not because you have the tool's range set too wide?
No-one in my family wears a green sweater, but I tried the correction tool out on the green in the cathedral windows at Quimper, and I seem to be able to frob the luminance and saturation sliders without affecting any other colours I can see at 100% magnification.

You can see the full size Flickr version (the green is in the hat) here

[afx]

First, OpenCL support was readily detected on Linux with NVidia drivers 304.51

I also use the 304.51 driver on my TP520 with an Nvidia Quadro NVS 4200M.
AS does not detect OpenCL. But the Luxmark benchmark runs just fine on the GPU.

Has anyone noted a grid pattern when the Highlight Warning is switched on (on large regions)?

cheers
afx

[fcoiffie]

I have the same problem : AS doesn't detect OpenCL support with by NVidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Gentoo Linux with drivers 304.51).
But Blender, LuxMark and other OpenCL applications work fine.

When I launch AS in a console, I get this message :

Code: Select all

0.749: ****     Making CLManager 
0.749: Got 0 platforms 
0.749: OpenCL is disabled in low mem mode 
0.749: "Could not select an OpenCL platform" 
0.749: ****     CLManager not initialized 

[Tuvok]

Has anyone noted a grid pattern when the Highlight Warning is switched on (on large regions)?

afx

Are you able to create an example? If I think what you see, I have this all the time with OpenCL disabled, and less often when OpenCL enabled. OpenCL enabled make editing slower in my case. Both for Mac OS X and Ubuntu

[afx]

It never shows up at 100%, it flickers in and out at intermediate zoomsteps and the example below is from fit to window.

cheers
afx

[Dutchmm]

AFX said:

Has anyone noted a grid pattern when the Highlight Warning is switched on (on large regions)?

Not here, but I found - and reported - an issue with Edit/Rotation/Rotate Right 90 - where the picture ends up upside down instead of on its side.

[Zarastro]

First, OpenCL support was readily detected on Linux with NVidia drivers 304.51

I also use the 304.51 driver on my TP520 with an Nvidia Quadro NVS 4200M.
AS does not detect OpenCL. But the Luxmark benchmark runs just fine on the GPU.

Have you installed the i686 NVidia libraries? I see you're running on 64-bit mode.

Since ASP is a 32-bit application I assume you need NVidia's 32-bit libraries to enable OpenCL.

[afx]

Have you installed the i686 NVidia libraries? I see you're running on 64-bit mode.

There is no explicit option to do this. The driver does it automatically and sets up /usr/lib32/libOpenCL.so.1.0.0 and related files and links.
But, AS comes with its own libOpenCL. When removing that so that it picks up the Nvidia supplied one, I still can not enable OpenCL.

cheers
afx

[ogrizzo]

I tried the new beta on my iMac (i7 at 2.8 GHz, Radeon 4850, OSX 10.8.2):

There was a slow but clear improvement while scaling up OpenCL support: time per picture went from 4.25 s (No) to 4.15 s (Standard), and then back up to 4.19 s (High).

Problem is: it took ASP 1.0.1.10 only 1.31 s per picture!

Is anyone seeing similar results on OSX?

[Vinny]

Hi Guys,

I am having problem with the zFrame. The frame disappears when it is being output to jpg.
It anyone having the same problem?

Vinny

[Hobgoblin]

Hi Guys,

I am having problem with the zFrame. The frame disappears when it is being output to jpg.
It anyone having the same problem?

Vinny

Yes.
Seems to screw it up completely.

Also try with ZText enabled but not ZFrame , image is fine but text is missing.

Something for the Monkey I guess.
R.

[Zarastro]

Have you installed the i686 NVidia libraries? I see you're running on 64-bit mode.

There is no explicit option to do this. The driver does it automatically and sets up /usr/lib32/libOpenCL.so.1.0.0 and related files and links.
afx

I'm running FC17 on x86_64 with rpmfusion's NVidia drivers, and from my previous experience you must explicitly install NVidia i686 libs for 32-bit apps. Anyway, this is a non-issue since ASP provides its own libOpenCL.

Anyway, I've checked if there are unsatisfied dependencies for libOpenCL.so.1.0.0 and there are none. Also, do you have (ugh!) LD_LIBRARY_PATH set?