Clarisse iFX Read Me

October 2nd, 2013

Thank you for purchasing Clarisse iFX! Below you'll find the information you need to get started.

Clarisse iFX Installation Instruction

Windows

Mac OS X

Linux

Minimum System Requirements

Clarisse has a modern fully multi-threaded architecture and massively uses all the available system cores. The more cores your CPU(s) have the faster it gets. Clarisse doesn't rely on GPUs (even for the 3D View), and thus doesn't require a high-end graphics card.

To avoid visual glitches and stability issues, please keep your display drivers up-to-date. You can find latest drivers from websites of graphics card manufacturers.

Mac OS X Note

Clarisse has been successfully tested on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) and Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)

Linux Note

We certify Clarisse on RHL/Centos 6.x x64 distributions. However many have been reported, Clarisse runs fine on other Linux distributions with the exception of small visual glitches.

Where can I find Clarisse iFX contents, tutorials and training?

You can download contents directly from My Download Area page. Tutorials can be found at the end of Clarisse iFX user guide documentation and in our forums. You can bring the user guide by pressing F1 key while in Clarisse.

Limitations and Known Issues

Windows

3D View performing poorly

On computers with NVIDIA Optimus technology enabled Clarisse 3d View can perform slowly even with nothing displayed. Clarisse is then running on the integrated Intel based graphics card instead.

We don't use any fancy GPU voodoo magic in Clarisse, however for some reasons our fragment shader used in the 3d View performs really poorly on integrated Intel based graphics card under Windows (This works fine under Linux).

To sort out this issue, make sure you launch Clarisse using the NVIDIA graphics card as primary graphics card. You can set this in the NVIDIA Control Panel.

Mac OS X

Retina Display

Clarisse isn't a Retina application. It has been reported rendering performance degradation depending on the screen resolution.

Linux

Instability on Linux with NVIDIA graphics cards

You may experience many random crashes during evaluations making Clarisse completely unusable. In that case, your NVIDIA drivers are probably older than 295.20.

If this is the case please update your driver as soon as possible. Prior to 295.20 release a driver bug is making Clarisse to crash quite systematically.

From nvidia change log: Fixed two bugs that caused sporadic application crashes in some multi-threaded OpenGL applications.

You may replace sporadic by systematic.

Interactivity issues and lags on Linux

We confirm interactive performance issues such as lags, slowdowns and hiccups in the UI that appears during evaluations. The issue is being located in the task/thread scheduler available prior to 2.6.23 kernel versions. The scheduler performs poorly with Clarisse's massively parallel evaluation engine.

For more information on the subject please read this.

Unfortunately, we are unable to provide any fix. To improve user interface responsiveness, you may try to reduce the number of cores allocated for evaluation in the Preferences Panel. This reduces evaluation speed but improves responsiveness. However this is not guaranteed to work 100% of cases.

If possible, the best is to upgrade to newer kernel. If you are running on RHL/Centos 5 and you wish to upgrade your kernel, please refer to this page. Disabling Hyper Threading has no effect unfortunately.