Anyone here use PTC Creo?

Hi.

I've got a Precision 7740 with RTX4000, and when I'm rendering in Creo 6 using Render Studio, my GPU usage never goes about 5% or so, but the CPU is always at 100%.

Shouldn't Creo be making use of the GPU?

Thanks

 

Typically rendering in CAD programs like Creo is CPU-bound. When you're modeling the part, the on-screen graphics are handled by the GPU, but the CPU is used for photorealistic rendering.

 

Thanks a lot for the reply.

I was surprised by that - I always thought that it was the GPU that was used for rendering - from the PTC website, talking about the Creo Render Studio:
" And with real-time ray-tracing, you can leverage existing scenes and appearances for your designs. The image is constantly rendering itself, so there’s no waiting."
- I thought ray-tracing was a GPU capability?

Oh well - good to know that there's nothing wrong with my setup, but a shame that my RTX GPU is of no use for CAD rendering!

Thanks

 

The GPU is just a CPU with cores specialized for certain calculations, so technically either can render an image. I'm not sure about the ray-tracing, this is relatively new, and probably dependent on support by the software, the graphics card, drivers, etc.

Someone more familiar with Creo or the ray-tracing details may be able to provide a better answer than I've done.

 

Currently, only the new Turing cards (Quadro RTX) have hardware-supported "real-time ray tracing"; however, this is pretty new. Ray tracing has traditionally been done entirely on the CPU. Wouldn't be surprised if Creo hasn't been updated to leverage GPU support yet. If they do it right then it should offer an enormous performance improvement I would think; however, there may be limitations in what is possible on these cards in terms of exactly what the output looks like, and they could prefer to keep doing it in software on the CPU.

(Games that offer ray-tracing support on RTX cards don't do ray tracing for the entire image; it is more of a hybrid approach with standard rasterization providing the graphics and ray tracing bolted on to improve the lighting and certain effects.)

 

Thanks for the reply too.

As well as Creo, I've got Solidworks Visualise 2020 which is supposed to be able to make use of the RTX cards:
https://blogs.solidworks.com/solidw...ks-visualize-introduces-rtx-acceleration.html

yet still my RTX4000 usage is minimal during rendering - it jumps to around 20% when I'm moving the model, but as soon as I stop moving it, and the live rendering continues, usage drops to less than 10%. Meanwhile the CPU runs at 100%.

I've got the latest drivers installed from the Nvidia website (only released a few days ago).

Could the CPU be acting as a bottleneck feeding the GPU? It's an i9-9980HK.

Thanks guys

 

You should maybe find a forum with other users of this software on different systems to compare results. I suspect that this is normal; even though the program is using the GPU, that doesn't mean that it has to be driving it up to high utilization. (Even a little bit of GPU utilization can save a lot of CPU time.) My understanding is that CAD programs are generally CPU-heavy. i9-9980HK is as good as it gets in this system. I believe CAD programs are generally single-threaded so the clock speed matters more than the core count. With a desktop system you could only clock up perhaps in the neighborhood of 1 GHz higher.

 

Interesting. Didn't know that.

Thank you!

 

When rendering on the CPU, it will use all the threads - if you have 4 cores, it will render 8 pieces of the final image (using hyperthreading).

 

Yep, does seem to be using all CPU cores according to task manager.

Thanks