Geodesic Viewshed on Raster performance

Question

I am running a geodesic viewshed analysis on a raster file / DSM that roughly represents a 9x3 nautical mile corridor. This raster file is a result of converting my LAS dataset into a raster file using the "LAS Dataset to Raster" Geoprocessing tool. With the geodesic viewshed tool, I've set the observer location within this corridor, and entered other specific values for the observer parameters (surface offset, observer offset, outer radius, etc.). Once ran, the progress bar is showing 14% complete, but this is after 2 hours and 9 minutes. At this pace, the geodesic viewshed will complete in 14 hours. Is this a realistic performance for the tool given the raster input? I'm hoping to repeat this process for other observation locations, but I would rather not have to wait another 14 hours.

AdrianSolomon · Answer

Update: I decided to run the geodesic viewshed with the aforementioned parameters to see how long before it reached 100%. After nearly 60+ hours of the tool creating the geodesic viewshed, the process states that it is 100% but the resulting viewshed layer has yet to display. At the time of this posting (3:05 PM EST), the status has not changed. No green bar indicating it has completed, nor new layer in the Contents bar for the resulting viewshed.

I will check back later this evening to see if the viewshed actually rendered.

Screenshot 2024-03-11 at 14.59.30.png

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AdrianSolomon · Answer

Thanks again. According to the article, it is a known limitation, that:

* The GPU and emulation only support DirectX11. DirectX12 features will not be available on this environment, and will fall back to DirectX11. If you choose OpenGL, you will receive an error stating no compatible graphics adapter was found, and rendering will fall back to CPU emulation.

It is the last sentence that appears to apply to my situation. According to this Parallels article, "Parallels uses OpenGL to implement 3D acceleration."

Again, I currently have Parallels Version 1.9.2 (23872) running on a virtualized Windows 11 machine.

I may need to find a way to elect to use DirectX instead of OpenGL if possible to avoid having my ArcGIS Pro fall back its rendering to the CPU.

danretired · Answer