[QGIS-Developer] QGIS 3D and Graphics Card Requirements

[Johannes Kröger (WhereGroup)]

Hi all,

the two ridiculously expensive and high-end graphics cards mentioned by 
Luke sound like complete overkill. Surely reading and preparing the 
geodata for 3D display (from data providers, via storage, on the CPU?) 
would be the bigger performance/usability issue of the 3D views, right? 
I am sure that for reasonable reasons QGIS would choke waaaay earlier 
than what those cards would be capable of. The potential benefit of 
those cards for QGIS 3D definitely is not worth paying *1200-2500€* extra.

Martin/Jean, is there any change that you could provide a more detailed 
specification of the hardware and software requirements for QGIS 3D? It 
comes up again and again and I've just been searching again without 
success. I step up to add it to the QGIS documentation in early November.

Esri provides for example infos on the required OpenGL version and 
extensions on 
https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/get-started/arcgis-pro-system-requirements.htm

E.g.: What is the minimum amount of GPU RAM necessary? How does it scale 
with more complex 3D scenes and what happens if there is not enough RAM? 
Does it get slow (maybe with a message) or does it crash? Which renderer 
does it use on which platforms (I guess always OpenGL?). Which OpenGL 
version is needed? Which extensions are needed? Could missing extensions 
get logged prominently to the user to avoid the "my 3D canvas is 
white/blank" issue (I guess that is the reason) that often comes up? 
Which features depend on which extensions and what happens if they are 
not available?

All the best, Hannes

Am 21.09.23 um 09:56 schrieb Martin Dobias via QGIS-Developer:
> Hey Luke
>
> Low end graphics cards should work fine as well. If your coworker 
> could not run 3D on his laptop, it could have been some other problem 
> - it would be good to have more details (hardware spec, operating 
> system, in what way things did not work) so that we can fix such 
> issues. For example, my laptop has 2GB of GPU memory and things work 
> just fine. So both of the suggested graphics cards should give you 
> much more power for QGIS 3D than you would normally need.
>
> Cheers
> Martin
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 20, 2023 at 11:20 PM Catania, Luke A ERDC-RDE-GRL-VA CIV 
> via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
>
>     Anyone out there working with QGIS 3D?
>
>     I am looking to get a new Dell laptop with i9 processor and 64GB
>     memory and wondering what the minimum requirements for working
>     with QGIS 3D is.  I had a coworker who could not run 3D on his
>     laptop assume due to his lower end graphics card.  I don’t offhand
>     know what the spec’s on his machine are.
>
>     I am looking at a Dell 7780 or 7680 with either *NVIDIA RTX 5000
>     Ada 16GB GDDR6 video card *or the*RTX 4000 Ada* *12GB GDDR6 video
>     card.*
>
>     **
>
>     Wondering if the higher end card buys me much better performance
>     and is worth the hit on battery life.
>
>     **
>
>     Luke
>
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