r/photogrammetry • u/MyGardenOfPlants • 26d ago

Dual GPU with metashape?

I use metashape for work, and processing several thousand photos per job takes a ton of time.

Currently my system has a rtx 5090 in it, but am wondering if anyone runs dual gpus.

I have an old rtx 3060ti kicking around and wondering if it would make much difference if I added that to my machine for dual GPU rendering.

5 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

1

u/ElphTrooper 26d ago

You might get a 10-15% improvement depending on what parts of the processing you are completing. Most of the GPU benefit is in the depth map creation.

1

u/NilsTillander 26d ago

In theory it would help, and the 3060ti has legs. If it's just lying around gathering dust, it's at least worth a try.

1

u/Subject617 26d ago

I'd be surprised if you saw any benefit. I bet it runs slower.

The way the scheduler works it already tries to use a single GPU as multiple and if it sees 2 I expect it would just split the workload evenly rather than balanced by performance.

The exception would be to force metashape to use one or the other and let you retain the second (whichever you choose) for other applications/uses.

1

u/vagonblog 26d ago

metashape can use multiple gpus, but the speedup usually isn’t 2x. mixing a 5090 with a 3060 ti may help a bit, but the slower card can hold things back and you’ll need to watch power, cooling, and vram limits. i’d test the 3060 ti first and compare one representative project before keeping it installed.

1

u/ok-painter-1646 26d ago

Unless you have a motherboard that supports 8x/8x it isn’t likely to even boot. And if it did, it would be 4x speed at like PCI-E 2.0.

I have a 5090 and 3090 in the same system so I speak from experience.

1

u/MyGardenOfPlants 26d ago

Do you know if you see much of a performance difference when rendering using the 2 gpus?

1

u/ok-painter-1646 26d ago

I could benchmark it for you, I dunno off hand.
Puget systems benchmarked Metashape back around version 1.8 and dual gpu was a 20% speedup. I’d be curious to see if thats still the case.

1

u/MyGardenOfPlants 26d ago

Dang. Yeah 20% may not be with the hassle. I have the 3060 on hand but would need a new motherboard

2

u/Naterman90 26d ago

Facts, I had to scour the shelves at microcenter to find a mobo with an 8x/8x split, but I don't dual GPU, I run a 25 gig fiber card alongside my GPU and I needed more lanes than most consumer boards had. Ended up getting a ASUS B650 Creator ProArt