Sensor Analysis freezes with the latest revision

[AdamC]

Hi, I am unable to use the most recent SharpCap revision 693 to perform sensor analysis on my Player One Neptune II C. SharpCap freezes, making it impossible to close or quit. accumulating frames without displaying the "start" button and not reacting to any features, exposure, gain, or other input. In order to terminate SharpCap, I must use Task Manager.
Any suggestions?

[admin]

Hi,

just tested here with that Mars-C and I'm not seeing any problems - can you send me a screenshot of what you see at the point you get stuck (a log captured from the log save folder after killing off SharpCap might be helpful too if the picture doesn't reveal anything).

cheers,

Robin

[AdamC]

Hello,
Screen is showing nothing. I attached log files.
Greetings from Newcastle, Ontario.

[admin]

Hi Adam,

in one of the logs, it looks like the CPU is struggling to keep up with the computational workload of the analysis - SharpCap records in the log that it has dropped the display update rate to 1fps to try to reduce the CPU load, but it doesn't seem to have helped much.

I'd suggest putting the camera into ROI mode (say 1280x1024 or 800x600) before doing the analysis to see if that helps. You could also try reducing the size of the red selection box which defines the are of the image that is being measured for the analysis procedure.

Hope this helps,

Robin

[AdamC]

Thank you. Will try and advise. Best Regards.

[AdamC]

Hello,
CPU was using 80% of its power so was not sufficient. I upgraded CPU to Ryzen9 12Core,dedicated Radeon GPU, 32Gb DDR5 RAM and all is working fine even with few programs working at the same time.
So, with high resolution cameras and complex proceudres powerful CPU/GPU is a must.
Regards

[admin]

Hi,

glad to hear that a faster CPU fixed the issue. Requirements really depend on the rate of flow of data from the camera and the amount of processing that needs to be done to the data - so simply capturing from a high resolution camera with long(ish) exposures would be fine on a slow CPU, but trying to run the same camera at a high frame rate or add processing like flat frame correction or planetary live stacking will overwhelm the same CPU.

The Ryzen 9 CPUs are rather good aren't they - I switched to using one early this year for my main PC

cheers,

Robin

[AdamC]

Also, I think fast 32 DDR5 RAM will help, and a dedicated GPU will greatly support the CPU in handling high-resolution images.
Astroimaging involves processing large images and stacks of frames. A dedicated GPU can accelerate this process, especially with software that leverages GPU computing for tasks like noise reduction, stacking, and image enhancement.
During live stacking or real-time image capture, a dedicated GPU can help render high-resolution previews more smoothly, allowing for better focusing and adjustments on the fly.
By offloading image processing tasks to the GPU, the Ryzen 9 CPU can focus on other intensive tasks, improving overall system performance and responsiveness.
Regards

[admin]

Hi Adam,

actually, SharpCap makes relatively little use of the GPU (apart from rendering the user interface). I've tried experiments at various times of pushing certain processing steps to the GPU, but typically the overheads of transferring the data to the GPU then back eats up almost all of the gain made by the GPU doing the work. I do continue to try from time to time to see if any processing can benefit from the GPU...

SharpCap does like having lots of CPU cores and will use multiple cores happily (some calculations like bits of planetary stacking are spread across multiple cores for performance).

cheers,

Robin