The subject of 'Bigger' - AKA Killing Computers

[dilanski]

I decided to stress test LDD, basically I'd like to answer the question of how big can we go.

Test 1-13,000 Bricks in scene (1 Inexorable Dreadnought/ 7.5 Deity Dreadnoughts/ 26 Heathen or Emperor Battleships)
Loading <30 seconds
Navigation is good
Loading single block is good
Placing single block is good
Loading 500 bricks is good
Placing 500 bricks is acceptable
Loading 13,000 bricks is poor
Placing 13,000 bricks is very poor

Test 2-26,000 Bricks in scene (2 Inexorable Dreadnoughts/ 15 Deity Dreadnoughts/ 52 Heathen or Emperor Battleships)
Loading >30 seconds
Navigation is good
Loading single block is good
Placing single block is good
Loading 500 bricks is acceptable
Placing 500 bricks is poor
Loading 13,000 bricks crashes LDD
Placing 13,000 bricks is impossible

Test 3-26,00 Bricks in scene - For this test I added 500 bricks, until it crashed at 30,000.

Test 4-Adding a fewer number of bricks at a time, I was able to get up to 35,000 bricks, until the system became unresponsive.

From this I can make the following conclusions.
If you have large duplication's, or imported sections, place them early in the build to keep the program stable, and give yourself best loading and placement times
Keep the part number down through any means, part number seems to be the main bottleneck.
Final touches to super large models should be done with only a few dozen pieces being moved simultaneously
Placing a single brick is generally stable at ridiculous part counts
Importing/copying large sections and placing them gets exponentially more cumbersome with part count

For the purposes of SHIP creating, if part count is kept low, and the design is kept generally thin, then thousands of studs in length seems obtainable without too much hassle.

[The Third World]

An Excellent and worthy question to find an answer too, I salute you sir!

[The Shadowscythe]

As of yesterday morning i have a brand spanking new pc, expect this to be . . . Tested dilanski.

[dilanski]

As of yesterday morning i have a brand spanking new pc, expect this to be . . . Tested dilanski.

Could we have specs please? Processor, Disk Speed, Ram and GPU.

[The Shadowscythe]

As of yesterday morning i have a brand spanking new pc, expect this to be . . . Tested dilanski.

Could we have specs please? Processor, Disk Speed, Ram and GPU.

Intel I5 3.2 Ghz quad core
Corsair gaming ram (1333hz) 8gb (planning to move up to 16gb at the end of the month)
1 Tb 7200 RPM Sata HDD
1 Gb Nvidia GT620 Graphics Card

Thats pretty much what I can pull off the top of my head, I may install a SSD as the primary drive at some point but that is in the pipeline with my other projects.

[Tzan]

Unless you are doing something crazy I don't think you need over 8gb.

If you are doing it for LDD only, you should really check where the bottle neck is.
I would suspect that its the memory on the graphics card not the main ram.
You should ask an expert, unless you already know and I'm totally wrong.
Which is possible.

[The Shadowscythe]

Unless you are doing something crazy I don't think you need over 8gb.

If you are doing it for LDD only, you should really check where the bottle neck is.
I would suspect that its the memory on the graphics card not the main ram.
You should ask an expert, unless you already know and I'm totally wrong.
Which is possible.

Planning to move up to 16gb for my recording stuff (letsplays and live action now i have both the people and the equiptment) and 3d work (say, along the lines of a trailer for the scythian shorts).

Plus it will never hurt, maybe in a years time i will up the graphics and then the cpu., but as i said, many projects to do and i kinda need to prioritise.

[dilanski]

Unless you are doing something crazy I don't think you need over 8gb.

If you are doing it for LDD only, you should really check where the bottle neck is.
I would suspect that its the memory on the graphics card not the main ram.
You should ask an expert, unless you already know and I'm totally wrong.
Which is possible.

Planning to move up to 16gb for my recording stuff (letsplays and live action now i have both the people and the equiptment) and 3d work (say, along the lines of a trailer for the scythian shorts).

Plus it will never hurt, maybe in a years time i will up the graphics and then the cpu., but as i said, many projects to do and i kinda need to prioritise.

It does seem odd to have 16GB ram on a gaming computer, but only have a GT 620, which from what I understand is outpaced by the Radeon HD 77XX's or GTX 650, you could probably get a 7750 over the GT 620 for the price of the upgrade.

[dilanski]

Unless you are doing something crazy I don't think you need over 8gb.

If you are doing it for LDD only, you should really check where the bottle neck is.
I would suspect that its the memory on the graphics card not the main ram.
You should ask an expert, unless you already know and I'm totally wrong.
Which is possible.

After a bit more testing, and looking at CPU and RAM usage. I think Tzan is right. I was finding more display driver errors than anything else, as It stood my CPU usage flattened out at about 30%, and RAM usage of LDD never even hit a GB. I think LDD does like powerful GPU's, as it stands I'm running 1GB GDDR5, whether LDD is even programmed to use more, I don't know. I've been looking between the R9 280X and GTX 770 for gaming recently anyway, with 3 GB and 2 GB respectively, so they could provide the boost needed for stable performance at high part counts.

[transformerj]

I think size is the bigger killer then part count.
I just made a 32x32x80 cube using 1x1 plates

It's 81,920 parts

I'm going to continue to see if i can get 100,000 parts

currently sitting at 122,960 parts
going for 150,000 parts

made it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
that's 1875 columns of 80 studs

[dilanski]

I had a new theory that may explain why you're colums are working, although I didn't plan on testing it.

Essentially all 3D models are made up of polygons, the more of these that need to be rendered, the more stress you have, especially in LDD which has proven to be an unthreaded CPU based task, and the CPU isn't optimised for parallel processing, which is what our part limit is determined by, how much grunt a single core of your CPU has, and how many polygons you want to render, now this does lead to an interesting observation, which may support this theory. LDD doesn't render covered studs at all, if you clip through bricks, you wont find a single stud, does this mean that at some point the LDD development team caught onto this, and implemented this to earn extra performance, anyone who was around when the first version of LDD was released a decade ago (Like this poor sod) know how well LDD performed back then, especially on low end machines, so it isn't too far flung to think the software team knew this.

Importantly for us, this would mean our solution is to cover our studs up.

[Quantumsurfer]

That makes a lot of sense.  That's why I can load and do things with multi thousand part ships built with SNOT but I sometimes have a difficult time with my forum battle layout, which is very little but exposed plates and baseplates.  Changes the way I'll approach interior layout design.

[transformerj]

did another test using 8x16 plates
no stacking
1728 parts
221,184 studs showing
tried to add another 4x??? number of plates and then it crashed

8x16 flat plates
no stacking
currently at 3500 parts ( got bored and stopped)
equivalent of 448,000 studs^2

[Colette]

Getting scientific about LDD I suppose?

[Quantumsurfer]

And why not?