[ros-users] RViz/OGRE3D and PCL hardware requirements/recommendations

[Ibrahim Awwal]

Well currently, for some reason when I even try to run the Rviz 
configuration from 
http://www.ros.org/wiki/kinect/Tutorials/Getting%20Started it doesn't 
even get started at all, which is really weird. It just sort of hangs 
looking like this: 
http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ibrahima/random/Screenshot-RViz.png

The last time I ran it it eventually filled in the topics for the Point 
Cloud2 and Camera, but I still could not interact with it at all. So 
maybe the issue is with something else? I installed the kinect package 
via the instructions on http://www.ros.org/wiki/kinect .

Previously with something else (trying to visualize a PR2) I was getting 
around 5 frames per second or less I believe, which was pretty annoying 
to work with.

-Ibrahim Awwal


On 1/15/2011 7:17 PM, Radu Bogdan Rusu wrote:
> Ibrahim,
>
> Just out of curiosity: are the PCL visualization accelerated on your 
> machine? Can you render point clouds fast enough? (I'll add a FPS text 
> to the visualizer later today).
>
> Cheers,
> Radu.
> -- 
> http://pointclouds.org
>
> On 01/15/2011 07:14 PM, Ibrahim Awwal wrote:
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> I'm having a problem running Rviz on my computer, which is an Intel Core
>> i5 2.4Ghz with an on-die GPU (integrated, but decent spec considering
>> it's made by Intel). According to google results this is at least
>> comparable to older nVidia graphics cards, but I can barely run Rviz and
>> it's very laggy on Ubuntu 10.10 with everything up to date. I also am
>> trying to work with the Kinect and openNI but the visualizations that
>> use Rviz are just too slow, although the regular libfreenect examples
>> (eg. freenect-glpclview) work perfectly fine at full framerate. It seems
>> like OGRE3D doesn't like intel GPUs unfortunately, but I've noticed that
>> some people are doing things with Atom boards, so I'm wondering whether
>> anyone else is able to run Rviz on Intel GPUs.
>>
>> I'm considering getting a cheap Intel Atom dual-core + nVidia ION box
>> for developing if it's unlikely for Rviz to work at all on Intel GPUs.
>> Would this be good enough for basic development? Ideally I could try to
>> run any CPU intensive nodes on my Core i5 and just do the visualization
>> on the ION box. Does anyone have experience with Atom+ION computers and
>> Rviz? I really need a development computer so that I don't need to go
>> into the lab to do anything useful. Thanks!
>>
>> (Addendum: Rviz also doesn't like new Radeon graphics cards either,
>> which is unfortunate because I do have a desktop with a high end Radeon
>> card. So in general, am I stuck with nVidia for doing anything with
>> Rviz, or is anyone having success with non-nVidia cards?)
>>