Einscan / Einstar EXScan Performance

I’ve been having some performance issues scanning with ~4 year old high end gaming rig and Einstar / EXScan and it made me ask, what hardware upgrade would give me the best bang for the buck? But to answer that, we need some benchmarks on how the Einstar / EXScan combo performs on newer & faster hardware. Lacking a standardized benchmark or any hardware comparisons I’ve seen, I was hoping we could share our hardware and anecdotal stories (what are you scanning, what detail level, are you CPU/GPU/RAM limited, etc.)

I’ll start: Intel Core i9 9900k 96 GB DDR4 @ 3200 MHz Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti WD PCIe M.2 SSD (~7300 MB/s)

My scanning experience: Scans car parts works well with some care using cornstarch to flatten glossy/reflective surfaces. Frame rates seem a little low around 11 fps?

Scanning parts like air intakes where the dimensions are in the 1-2 foot range, with or without tracking dots, it tends to lose tracking at some point and sometimes creates “double vision” geometry. The rewind function in EXScan to remove these is slow as molasses and if I try to go too far back it locks up seemingly forever (it may actually finish but it’s faster to close the application and start over scanning from scratch). Due to these tracking issues I find it faster to make separate, short scans of top, bottom, and other views if needed and align/combine them in the mesh generation process.

Point cloud / mesh generation seems to saturate my CPU (all cores at 100%) and the GPU seldom goes over 25%. At the high resolution setting, I’ve actually run out of RAM trying to mesh an intake manifold which I did in 4 separate scans at max resolution to get good detail on all the features. I was able to toss the data and start over with 3 separate scans covering the important bits instead and didn’t run out of RAM, but I did see times where the system was seemingly stalled and during this the memory usage ramped up rapidly from 10 GB to over 70 GB.

I don’t know if this means there is a bottleneck loading from storage or if this is purely a memory bandwidth bottleneck as EXScan is copying or creating data from stuff already in RAM. This makes me wonder if a workstation with 4+ memory channels or even just moving to DDR5 (new CPU, motherboard, RAM required) would greatly speed up the process. Mostly when I start generating a point cloud or mesh, I just walk away from the computer as it’s going to be a while, at least several minutes even on my smaller scans.