Enhancing Autopano's performance

From Autopano

This tutorial describes how to make Autopano run fast and efficiently depending on the type of project you are working on.

Minimal configuration and recommanded configuration

• Minimal: Autopano can run fine on machines having a 1 Ghz processor and 1 Gb of RAM. Windows, Mac (Intel only) and Linux are supported.
• Recommanded: To create big panoramas, we recommand you to use:
  • The 64-bit version of your operating system if your hardware can handle it (eg. Windows Vista 64 bits, Mac OS 10.6 - 64 bits, Ubuntu 9.04 - 64 bits, etc)
  • A 2 Ghz processor or more
  • Multi-core processors if you run a 64-bit operating system
  • 2 Gb of RAM or more
  • A recent graphics card

Speeding up panorama editing

In Autopano, you can have the panorama editor work in real-time. This is not set by default, because some machines are not compatible. So you should turn this option on if your hardware is fine for that.

• Go in the Edit > Preferences menu
• On the bottom of the window, you have the "GPU processing" section. This is where you can enable the use of the graphics card in the panorama editor.
• Click on "Check". You can see information about your graphics card. Click on the "Render" tab. If both images are the same, then your hardware is ready to use the GPU processing.
• To activate the GPU processing, click on "Enable" in the general preferences window.

Speeding up Autopano

Here are some suggestions to speed up Autopano:

• Set your Anti-Virus run-time module to ignore the source and destination directories of your panos, and the Autopano temp directory.
• To speed up rendering, close all the editor windows, each window takes up an amount of memory and this will free up memory for APP and other applications.

Avoiding program crashes

If you experience crashes during the rendering of a panorama, then you should do the following :

• In the Edit > Preferences menu:
  • Look at the path of the temporary folder and check in your operating system that the disk containing the temporary folder has at least 20 Gb of free space.
  • Set the cache size to the minimum, for example 10 Mb or 20 Mb.
  • Set the memory used during the rendering to low.
  • If you are running a 32-bit operating system, set the number of CPU to 1 or 2.

• Using the 64-bit version of your operating system usually gives good results, since the memory is managed really better than on a 32-bit system.
• Close all other programs during renderings of big panoramas, including background tasks.

Optimizing disk writing

You can also optimize the way the files are written on your drive.

• Put the temporary folder on a separate drive
• Destination folder can be on the same drive where Autopano is installed