SplashTool v2.0.0 is now available in the customer area! The new version comes with some innovations:
The major version jump from version 1 to version 2 was chosen because the CUDA toolkit is now included in the installer. Separate installation of the CUDA toolkit is no longer required, and the setup automatically installs the appropriate version of the CUDA toolkit in the SplashTool installation directory.
In the advanced settings, there is the option to choose the maximum water depth alongside the output of water depth at the end of the iteration as an output option. Important: This output file cannot be compared to the output of maximum water depth from a hydrodynamic simulation. Firstly, SplashTool does not use a hydrodynamic approach considering roughness, momentum, etc., moreover, in SplashTool, the entire water volume is applied to the terrain model at the beginning of the iteration. I still recommend for interpretation the combination of flow paths (flowacc) and the water depth at the end of the iteration (wd), which represents the water depth in flowless terrain depressions. Anyone who still wants to try the new option now has the opportunity to do so!
In addition to some smaller updates to the underlying libraries, the CUDA toolkit has also been updated and now supports the latest Nvidia graphics cards of the Ada Lovelace generation (e.g., Nvidia RTX 4080 and Nvidia RTX 4090). It has been shown in tests that the computing performance on older graphics cards decreases slightly with the update, by about 10% to 15%. To ensure ongoing support for new and more powerful hardware, I have nevertheless decided to carry out the update to the new CUDA toolkit. It may be that future updates and further optimizations in future versions will see speed gains again. The graphics cards of the latest generation offer significantly higher performance with lower power consumption at the same time. Thus, the smaller model RTX 4080 is already noticeably faster with SplashTool than the larger model of the previous generation, the RTX 3090.
Should I upgrade?
- Do you have a new graphics card of the Ada Lovelace generation?
- Do you need the new function for outputting the maximum water depth?
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the questions, you should upgrade. If not, I recommend continuing to work with version 1.0.1 to benefit from the slightly better performance on older graphics cards.