We have just released Capture 2025.1, which comes with a few improvements that deserve a little bit more information than what's available in the release notes.

Adaptive Quality

Capture's adaptive quality visualisation is designed to ensure that the quality of the visualisation is always as high as possible, without sacrificing the frame rate. This is achieved by continuously measuring the time required by the video card for every frame and adjusting the level of detail as necessary. The aim is to not fall (far) below 30 frames per second.

As video cards grow ever more powerful, larger designs now push processors rather than video cards to their limit. The amount of work that needs to be done on the processor is always constant - it does not matter to the processor how many pixels are to be rendered. As a result you can be limited to a lower frame rate because of the processor.

As of Capture 2025.1, this no longer leads to an adaptive quality reduction. We now measure the time required by the video card in a way that is not affected by processor bottlenecks.

We are carefully optimistic that this means that it will no longer be meaningful to turn adaptive quality off on machines that are limited by their processor.

(As a side note it's worth mentioning that it can be hard to tell whether your system is limited by its processor by looking at the Task Manager or Activity Monitor. It's not simply a matter of whether 100% of the processor is used or not, as not all steps in the visualisation can be or are parallelised. The best way of judging is by telling whether any single core is used to 100% - that would be a sign of a processor bottleneck.)

SketchUp 2025

You can now import SketchUp 2025 files. This means that we now also support importing SketchUp's new PBR model materials and HDRIs.

Since we found several SketchUp 2025 sample files with HDRIs using the RGBE (Radiance HDR) file format we decided to add general support for this format as well. At this point we don't support all the bells and whistles of RGBE such as mirroring and rotation, colour correction and other advanced modifiers - but we don't expect this to be a problem.

Martin P3

Timing the release of Capture 2025 with that of Martin P3 6.2 was tight, so a few things had to be left for Capture 2025.1.

A new Sequential P3 Fixture Number command has been added, making it easier to assign fixture numbers to larger amounts of fixtures. The full list of assignment options is now:

• Entering fixture numbers one by one under Selected Items.
• Sequential P3 Fixture Number.
• Exporting fixture data (to CSV / TSV), entering fixture numbers in a spreadsheet application and then reimporting the fixture data.
• Importing fixture numbers from a live P3 system. This requires fixtures to already be patched correctly in both Capture and P3.

P3 is also capable of controlling fixtures, such as VDO Sceptrons, without the use of any DMX. Capture now supports this too - simply assign the fixture to a P3 controller and give it a fixture number. It will then receive its pixel data from P3 without any need to patch it.

Finally Capture now also supports subtractive CMY colour mixing fixtures as well - even if P3 allows for a higher granularity of pixel control than the Capture fixture.