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Can't find GPU option

  • 14 October 2021
  • 4 replies
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Hi, 

I found options to enable/disable GPU calculations in the ZOSAPI help (bool ZOSAPI.Preferences.IPreferencesGeneral.GetIsGPUEnabled() ), but I can’t find them in Project Preferences → General in OpticStudio nor in my standalone application.

When I run a batch ray trace, I can see that the computation are done using the GPU.

Thanks

 

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Best answer by Csilla Timar-Fulep 18 October 2021, 16:56

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4 replies

Userlevel 5
Badge +2

Hi Adub,

Thanks for your post here in the community forums.

The Get/SetIsGPUEnabled settings were part of a feature experiment to enable GPU Huygens calculations. So this was intended to only affect the Huygens PSF/Huygens MTF calculations (along with Single Mode Fiber coupling if Huygens Integral is selected). I will double-check with our developers to confirm the results of this experiment.

Unfortunately, OpticStudio currently doesn’t support GPU-accelerated ray tracing. One of our customers set up their own platform for GPU ray tracing, which has been presented in this webinar:
GPU-optimized light-tissue simulation integrated with the OpticStudio – Zemax

For further discussion about GPU ray tracing, please refer to this forum thread:
Ray Tracing with GPU | Zemax Community

Best,
Csilla

Userlevel 5
Badge +2

Hello again Adub,

I have double checked internally and would like to follow-up here as well about the feature experiment on GPU Huygens calculations.

Unfortunately, this GPU-enabled Huygens calculations feature hasn’t been released yet, so it is not a documented feature. Therefore, currently there is no corresponding setting in the OpticStudio GUI. Please keep in mind, that even if it is enabled from the ZOS-API, there are restrictions on what kind of hardware and for what Huygens settings the hardware acceleration can be utilized.

Best,
Csilla

Userlevel 7
Badge +3

I would be interested to learn more about the results of the Huygen’s PSF Feature Experiment.  Some of the technical implementation details are nicely explained in: Application of GPUs in optical design software. Since this Feature Experiment has been removed, I’m guessing the overall benefit didn’t outweigh the various implementation constraints?

 

 

Userlevel 5
Badge +2

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for your follow-up post here, and for your interest in this topic.

Unfortunately, at this point, we don’t have any further public documentation or publication which could be shared, other than the paper you mentioned above.

We will keep you posted if there is any further info we can share about this feature experiment.

Best,
Csilla

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