Pixinsight/Windows 10/CUDA - amazing speed uplift!!!

[Skipper Billy]

If you use Pixinsight for processing and you have an Nvidia GeForce graphics card there is a trick you can use to force some processes to use the cores of your graphics card for the heavy lifting The most intensive programme I use is Starnet++ to produce a starless image which allows me to process the stars separately from the background then merge them back together as they need quite different techniques. On my old machine it took 22 minutes to solve an average image, my new machine will do it in 6 minutes which I thought was pretty impressive. Using the CUDA cores it does it in 32 seconds !!!! The full details are here - it sounds complicated but take it step by step and its quite straightforward. It only works with Windows 10 64 bit, Pixinsight and Nvidia Geforce graphics cards !!! https://darkskies.space/pixinsight-starnet-cuda/ 

[SlimPaling]

Hi .... this is interesting.

I am not a computer geek .... my computer has a Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 .... do you know if these changes will work on it?

If I make a mess of it can I go back to the original settings?

Mike

[Skipper Billy]

If you click on the list of suitable cards in the link in my post you can see which cards are 'in the game'.

Your card is on the list.

Just take your time - one step at a time - read each step twice and do it once. 😉 

 

[The Lazy Astronomer]

On 02/02/2022 at 22:35, Skipper Billy said:

If you use Pixinsight for processing and you have an Nvidia GeForce graphics card there is a trick you can use to force some processes to use the cores of your graphics card for the heavy lifting The most intensive programme I use is Starnet++ to produce a starless image which allows me to process the stars separately from the background then merge them back together as they need quite different techniques. On my old machine it took 22 minutes to solve an average image, my new machine will do it in 6 minutes which I thought was pretty impressive. Using the CUDA cores it does it in 32 seconds !!!! The full details are here - it sounds complicated but take it step by step and its quite straightforward. It only works with Windows 10 64 bit, Pixinsight and Nvidia Geforce graphics cards !!! https://darkskies.space/pixinsight-starnet-cuda/ 

You may or may not have seen already, but this might be of interest, certainly a speed improvement on my machine, and I've seen reports from CN along the same lines too:

 

[kirkster501]

Yes it works well.  However, I recently moved over to Russell Croman's Star Xterminator.  It does a better job IMO and works on linear images too and is much faster that Starnet++.   Manipulating stars in images is a key processing task and I felt it was worth the cost.

[Richard_]

As an FYI, this tip also works with Starnet++ v2!

When run on my machine with an RTX 2060 Max-Q graphics card, the base Starnet++ v2 package took about 59s to execute on one image but after the cuda trick it reduced to 13s on the same image. A huge reduction in time!