Hardware components usage during processing - PIX4Dmapper

This article explains how PIX4Dmapper utilizes each hardware component at each processing step

Information:

For more information about the use of the GPU: Use of the GPU in PIX4Dmapper.
For recommendations for a Hardware and Software Configuration: How to decide which hardware to buy.
For more information regarding: Mac / Windows XP / Linux / Remote Access - Virtual machine / Distributed - Parallel processing: macOS / Windows XP / Linux / Remote access / Parallel processing.
For more information about the processing speed: Processing speed.

The software is highly parallelized and takes advantage of multi-core CPUs, as well as MMX/SIMD instructions and NVIDIA GPU Cuda processing. However, the different steps of the processing do not use the resources the same way, and not all parts can take advantage of multi-core or CUDA.

Step 1

CPU	RAM	Hard Disk	GPU
Most important component. In some sub-processing steps all the available CPU resources will be used whereas in others not all the CPU is used*.	Low usage.	Low usage.	(optional) Medium/high usage.

Step 2

CPU	RAM	Hard Disk	GPU
Most important component. Fully used. This step will use all the CPU resources available.	Most important component. Fully used. This step will use all the RAM resources available.	Low usage.	Low usage.

Step 3

CPU	RAM	Hard Disk	GPU
Low usage.	High usage.	Most important component. The speed of the Hard Disk defines the processing speed.	No usage.

Ray Cloud

CPU	RAM	Hard Disk	GPU
Low usage.	Low usage.	Low usage.	Most important component.

*Some parts of the processing cannot be paralleled, and some of them do not consume a lot of resources. However, they need to be completed in order to start the next processing process.