I am starting to use BlurXTerminator and I am impressed. However I built my workstation 8 years ago and it takes 10 minutes to process BXT. It would be useful to know how long it takes other users and what in particular helps speed things up. I have 16GB of RAM, an Intel I7-4790K processor running at 4GHz and a graphics card GeForce GTX 1050. Is there a relatively cheap way of speeding things up? That's on a 1600MC file. I also have a TB SSD.
BlurXTerminator
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That is a pretty old machine so your options are limited. You might see if there is some way to support an eGPU and that would help. Still, that isn’t a guarantee and the cost may be better served by upgrading your machine.
For the sake of comparison, my Mac Studio Ultra processes an integrated 2600mc file through BlurX in about 18s.
For the sake of comparison, my Mac Studio Ultra processes an integrated 2600mc file through BlurX in about 18s.
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To add another data point, my PC with Ryzen9 7950X and 3090Ti goes through 2600MM integrated image in 7.9s while my laptop with and old i7-5700HQ takes some 9 minutes so newer and high spec gear really makes a huge difference.
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Takes a few seconds with my 3080ti card.
For a 62Mpix image it takes about 40s on an M1 Ultra. CS, John
It's either a video card or an Apple machine with M1/2 cpu. A basic Apple Air M1 just shreds the Noise/Star/Blur-Exterminator tasks.
My Mac mini M1 (16 GB RAM) is also very fast, only a few seconds. It's nice that it runs natively and not under emulation.
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Hi David,
I have just upgraded my PC from something close to identical to your rig.
I had an 4690K, 16 GB of DDR3 and a SATA SSD.
I have upgraded to a 13700K, 32 GB of DDR5 and a couple of NVMe SSDs.
I run BlurXterminator on a 9 mpix image (asi533mc) in close to 1 min and drizzled data (36 mpix) in 4 min, so it scales linearly with size. It takes full advantage of all 24 CPU threads while running. I have a GTX 970, but have not looked into enabling GPU acceleration for this.
In general, PI runs 6-8 times faster on my new setup.
Crucially, not all SSDs are equal! While all are faster than traditional HDDs, a SATA disk is limited to around 600 MB/s, where my fastest PCIe 4.0 NVMe runs at up to 7300 MB/s! This is not really important for BlurXterminator, but makes a big difference for other processes!
BR
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I have just upgraded my PC from something close to identical to your rig.
I had an 4690K, 16 GB of DDR3 and a SATA SSD.
I have upgraded to a 13700K, 32 GB of DDR5 and a couple of NVMe SSDs.
I run BlurXterminator on a 9 mpix image (asi533mc) in close to 1 min and drizzled data (36 mpix) in 4 min, so it scales linearly with size. It takes full advantage of all 24 CPU threads while running. I have a GTX 970, but have not looked into enabling GPU acceleration for this.
In general, PI runs 6-8 times faster on my new setup.
Crucially, not all SSDs are equal! While all are faster than traditional HDDs, a SATA disk is limited to around 600 MB/s, where my fastest PCIe 4.0 NVMe runs at up to 7300 MB/s! This is not really important for BlurXterminator, but makes a big difference for other processes!
BR
Morsing
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Yes, it's either nVidia CUDA way, or apple M way, haha~
Thanks for all the information. Does anyone know if it's the graphics card in particular that slows things down or is a combination of things which means a new motherboard, processor, graphics card, PSU and memory?
In the instructions there are complex instructions for speeding up the graphics card, which are not needed for Apple users.
In the instructions there are complex instructions for speeding up the graphics card, which are not needed for Apple users.
David Moore:
Thanks for all the information. Does anyone know if it's the graphics card in particular that slows things down or is a combination of things which means a new motherboard, processor, graphics card, PSU and memory?
To my knowledge, none of the "Xterminator" processes use GPU acceleration natively. I do think they'll take advantage of acceleration via CUDA. Pretty sure getting it to work has been rather hit/miss. For example, I know I saw some people got it working with v11.7 of CUDA, but not with the latest v12.x.
Ultimately, it's your 10 year old hardware: CPU being the biggest bottleneck. As an example, my 2019 MacBook Pro with the 2.3GHz 8-core i9 and 16G RAM runs BXT against data from my 294MM in default mode in about 30 seconds and about 1:45 for bin1 data.
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I didn't time it exactly but my MacBook Pro M2 runs BXT on a 1x1 bin IMX455 frame (~130 MB) in about 45 seconds.
John
John
I took a single IMX455 bin 1x1 HA sub and ran the tool on it:
BlurXTerminator: Processing view:
Heart_SN_LIGHT_HA_300s_BIN1_10C_001_20221113_223236_499_GA_56_OF_40_W
Writing swap files…6267.578 MiB/s
RC-Astro BlurXTerminator, version 1.0.2
Initializing…
Processing: done
20.895 s
BlurXTerminator: Processing view:
Heart_SN_LIGHT_HA_300s_BIN1_10C_001_20221113_223236_499_GA_56_OF_40_W
Writing swap files…6267.578 MiB/s
RC-Astro BlurXTerminator, version 1.0.2
Initializing…
Processing: done
20.895 s
David Moore:
I am starting to use BlurXTerminator and I am impressed. However I built my workstation 8 years ago and it takes 10 minutes to process BXT. It would be useful to know how long it takes other users and what in particular helps speed things up. I have 16GB of RAM, an Intel I7-4790K processor running at 4GHz and a graphics card GeForce GTX 1050. Is there a relatively cheap way of speeding things up? That's on a 1600MC file. I also have a TB SSD.
I am not so sure how helpful all the posted numbers are since all run it on frames of different size & kind plus the parameters used in BlurXterm might be different (which also matters w.r.t processing time). I am proposing the original poster provides one file and all who are interested to participate run that file on their machine and then post the time here. Then we have fair comparisons.
CS, John
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I have not done anything special to enable/disable GPU, I just installed BXT and started using it. On a raw sub from my ASI294MC Pro (4144x2122) it takes 4 seconds to run.
I built the system for processing:
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core Processor
64 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 w/ 12 GB dedicate graphics memory
I haven't run mine in awhile, but it might be an interesting experiment to share a FITS file as a "benchmark" and compare BTX runtime to the PI benchmark. My assumption is whatever makes that improve will help with the BTX. I did make sure I got as fast an SSD as I could afford for the setup and I typically stage my files on my main drive for processing.
I built the system for processing:
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core Processor
64 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 w/ 12 GB dedicate graphics memory
I haven't run mine in awhile, but it might be an interesting experiment to share a FITS file as a "benchmark" and compare BTX runtime to the PI benchmark. My assumption is whatever makes that improve will help with the BTX. I did make sure I got as fast an SSD as I could afford for the setup and I typically stage my files on my main drive for processing.
David Moore:
I am starting to use BlurXTerminator and I am impressed. However I built my workstation 8 years ago and it takes 10 minutes to process BXT. It would be useful to know how long it takes other users and what in particular helps speed things up. I have 16GB of RAM, an Intel I7-4790K processor running at 4GHz and a graphics card GeForce GTX 1050. Is there a relatively cheap way of speeding things up? That's on a 1600MC file. I also have a TB SSD.
I am not so sure how helpful all the posted numbers are since all run it on frames of different size & kind plus the parameters used in BlurXterm might be different (which also matters w.r.t processing time). I am proposing the original poster provides one file and all who are interested to participate run that file on their machine and then post the time here. Then we have fair comparisons.
CS, John
I ran it with default settings in the tool, FWIW. If someone wants to share a common image, happy to test it.
As the original poster, as requested here is a TIFF file of the Pacman Nebula taken with a ZWO 2600MC. As a matter of interest it looks like street light or some other light has got in at the top. I tried a FITS format file but deprecated file format came up in BXT processing. Both files took 11 mins to process. In case it makes a difference settings were:- sharpen stars 0.25, adj halos 0.0, auto PSF, sharpen non stellar 0.90, correct first ticked, select AI file done.
Saying that 1/2 of it loaded then this message came up
Error posting the file to /json-api/common/ckeditor-upload/?CKEditor=id_body&CKEditorFuncNum=2&langCode=en-gb
I cropped it 50% and it still failed as max size 50MB and it's still too big. I may try again later.
Tried later cropped again and now failed as max size now 20MB. Time to get on with the day.
Saying that 1/2 of it loaded then this message came up
Error posting the file to /json-api/common/ckeditor-upload/?CKEditor=id_body&CKEditorFuncNum=2&langCode=en-gb
I cropped it 50% and it still failed as max size 50MB and it's still too big. I may try again later.
Tried later cropped again and now failed as max size now 20MB. Time to get on with the day.
David Moore:
As the original poster, as requested here is a TIFF file of the Pacman Nebula taken with a ZWO 2600MC. As a matter of interest it looks like street light or some other light has got in at the top. I tried a FITS format file but deprecated file format came up in BXT processing. Both files took 11 mins to process. In case it makes a difference settings were:- sharpen stars 0.25, adj halos 0.0, auto PSF, sharpen non stellar 0.90, correct first ticked, select AI file done.
Saying that 1/2 of it loaded then this message came up
Error posting the file to /json-api/common/ckeditor-upload/?CKEditor=id_body&CKEditorFuncNum=2&langCode=en-gb
I cropped it 50% and it still failed as max size 50MB and it's still too big. I may try again later.
Tried later cropped again and now failed as max size now 20MB. Time to get on with the day.
Where is the image?
Sorry I have run out of time trying to do this but if anyone else wants to upload an image feel free.
I just use the time as an excuse to get another cup of coffee.
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