Questions about hardware requirements and UE Live View setup

[Enei7]

Hi, thank you for releasing this simulator.

I have two questions about the setup and runtime performance:
1、What hardware configuration was used for your experiments or demonstrations?
I am currently running the simulator on an NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU, but the simulation is still very slow and laggy. I would like to know whether this is expected, or whether there are any recommended settings to improve the runtime performance.
2、When using the UE Live View, do I need to launch a local AirSim instance separately?
I am not fully sure whether the UE Live View is connected to a locally running AirSim/Unreal Engine environment, or whether it can work directly through the SimART pipeline.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[guchuanv-alt]

Thank you for raising these issues!

1. Regarding the hardware requirements, an RTX 3090 should be sufficient for running SimART. In our experiments, we were able to run the simulations on an RTX 3060 Ti. The preview window in SimART may be laggy, but what we care about is the FPS of the published ROS topics that contain the desired simulation data.

For the AirSim-related ROS topics, we have optimized the performance of the AirSim ROS wrapper. However, other developers have also reported that the original version of the AirSim ROS wrapper is not very efficient, so our minor optimization may have limited impact. Therefore, we may adopt a more efficient method to improve the FPS in the future updates. Now you may decrease camera resolution and quantity (a 480p stereo camera is fine), avoid activating more than 1 base station-camera at the same time to acquire higher FPS (Base-station cameras can use 720p since I added some activation limits to them).

Another setting that we highly recommend is to launch AirSim through Game mode instead of Play in Editor mode. This script might help you. In this script, I also removed the FPS limit in AirSim. Therefore, the FPS will increase in ROS topics. Additionally, use "NoDisplay" mode in AirSim.

runairsim_UE_clean.sh

For the Sionna-related ROS topics, the performance mainly depends on the single-core performance of the CPU. You may also use the re-sim wireless function to increase the FPS.

2. You need to launch a local AirSim instance. SimART connects to AirSim via the host IP. If you run AirSim on the same computer, the default IP setting should work.

[Enei7]

Thank you for answer! Best wishes!