Performance tips to speed up your machine

MapTiler Desktop is a multi-threaded program. The modern CPUs have multiple cores and support Hyperthreading which provides multiple logical CPUs per core. This way MapTiler Desktop can provide higher performance even on a dual-core computer. This article provides some tips that might help to improve the performance of the map rendering process. 

Upgrade to a higher plan

The Free version is limited to 1 CPU, MapTiler Desktop Start and Plus have a limit of 2 CPUs for rendering, which doubles the rendering speed.

The Pro version is able to render on 4 or more CPUs depending on your license. With such power, it is easily able to render extremely large datasets (e.g. continents or the whole world).

The number of purchased CPUs is automatically detected and if the computer is capable of faster rendering, it is possible to purchase additional CPUs for higher rendering speed. The information about the number of CPUs and possible upgrade is available in File -> License… or it is visible during rendering.

Optimize your workflow

Apart from buying more CPUs, you can also reach the speed gain by optimizing your workflow, especially for a large amount of data. MapTiler Desktop is the most effective reading 256x256 blocks of data.

For large raster datasets, a tile based format (as opposed to scanline-based) will drastically speed up processing. A block size that is similar to the tile output size e.g. 256x256 or 512x512 will significantly speed up the processing time. Also, consider adding overviews to the raster file.

Both things can be done using command-line tools of the GDAL library, such as gdalwarp and gdaladdo.

One of the formats that makes use of all the mentioned optimizations is the Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF format (COG). To convert your file using the gdalwarp utility, use this command in the terminal:

gdalwarp -of COG -co COMPRESSION=DELFATE input.tiff output.tiff

Useful links

GDAL documentation
MapTiler Desktop pricing