CONNECT still slow

Hi Martin,

You should have used shared cells for all the trees and plants these are what is taking so long to load and display. I would delete all of them compress the file and place shared cells using our Populate tool. The Xfrog trees from European 3 are all to heavy unless the whole point of the render is to see a tree. If you use the ones from European 1 or 2 they are much smaller. In any case using shared cells for these will make your file load and display faster and also they will be replicators in Luxology and render faster as well.

I had David Stradley who works on our display engine have a look and here is what he found. I am not sure where the cells that are on the last two levels in list below came from but they are the slowest.

Hi Jerry,

thanks a lot for taking care of the analysis!

It's funny how things and best practices has changed: In the past, it was recommended to do not use shared cells for rendering, because plenty of issues (memory consumption, performance, robustness) existed when there were plenty of shared cells in model. Now the shared cells, accordingly to your information, are the way for better performance. Still learning something new ;-)

Seeing the numbers, I am thinking about:

• Whether Update 14 will bring display performance increase? I know the performance consists from more parts, but whereas e.g. optimization at API level is somehow visible (at least for developers), changes, enhancements and plans for display engine itself are not discussed.
• Whether there are plans to support DirectX 12 or Vulkan APIs that without any doubts offer much better performance compared to DirectX 11.
• And finally, why MicroStation is still so slow compared to what every gaming engine offer (but I am aware to display something and to be interactive are two very different things).

Regards,

  Jan

Hi Jerry,

thanks a lot for taking care of the analysis!

It's funny how things and best practices has changed: In the past, it was recommended to do not use shared cells for rendering, because plenty of issues (memory consumption, performance, robustness) existed when there were plenty of shared cells in model. Now the shared cells, accordingly to your information, are the way for better performance. Still learning something new ;-)

Seeing the numbers, I am thinking about:

• Whether Update 14 will bring display performance increase? I know the performance consists from more parts, but whereas e.g. optimization at API level is somehow visible (at least for developers), changes, enhancements and plans for display engine itself are not discussed.
• Whether there are plans to support DirectX 12 or Vulkan APIs that without any doubts offer much better performance compared to DirectX 11.
• And finally, why MicroStation is still so slow compared to what every gaming engine offer (but I am aware to display something and to be interactive are two very different things).

Regards,

  Jan

Hi Jan,

I believe that we made many improvements in shared cells back in V8i when we added Luxology render engine to take advantage of replicators.

No plans at moment for moving to DirectX 12 for MicroStation but DirectX 12 will be supported with LumenRT in future along with DXR and real time ray tracing. Game engines all rely on optimization and large data sets that MicroStation can handle would not be handled better by a game engine. LumenRT can handle very large data sets better than Unreal and others.

For displaying MicroStation scenes with game like performance LumenRT is the way to go. In MicroStation we don't do any tricks we display everything, the exception would be scalable meshes which are dependent on how close the camera is to the mesh.

Cheers,

Jerry