Framerate issue when open renderer is out of view

Szaben · November 21, 2013, 4:23pm

Hi,

I noticed some strange behaviour and was able to figure out the source.

what happened: while scrolling through a patch, i noticed the framerate would sometimes drop to exactly half, while gpu load doubled, for no aparent reason. this behaviour was directly linked to the visible portion of my patch.

reason: an open (alt+2) render window that is NOT within the visible part of the patch. framerate drops as soon as the renderer is outside of what i see, and recovers when i scroll back.
occurs with any alt+2 tabbed render window, even when it doesn’t show any content. tested with v. 30, 31 and 31.2; tested with an empty patch as well, but only on my machine (nvidia gtx280). only occurs for renderer in-patch (alt+2), not for hidden ‘free’(alt+1) render windows.

is this a bug or a feature? i mean i know i’m not supposed to leave my unused renderers open, but double gpu load just seems ridiculus for this case.

unti · November 23, 2013, 12:21pm

I am just guessing here but could it be that vvvv mistakes this scrolling as losing focus and uses only the background fps of the mainloop node?

Szaben · November 25, 2013, 5:39pm

good guess, but no (though loosing focus might have to do with it).

seems more like a random vvvv bug, which I know now to avoid but i would love to know if it’s linked to my machine/driver setup.

reminds me of another bug that i had more than once.
I do a show with a projector that is connected via VGA. Final renderer recieves a Texture that i preview in some render window within the patch. I close the renderer (alt+3 OR delete), and the beamer image goes white - i.e. the texture source is deactivated, even though the final renderer is still listening.
Texture would pop up when I connect another preview-renderer or reload the patch.

Or, what i have All Of The Freaking Time, when i manually move my render window onto the projector, I cannot load geometry to that window/pipeline. Only sure solution for me turned out to be: place the window at projector screen; completly reload vvvv; done! funny enough i then CAN move the window back and forth between my screens, it just has to ‘be born’ on snd monitor.

btw is there an open thread that discusses this type of random usability bugs? I could think of one or two more, maybe. they are all easy to avoid when you know them…

minimal setup to (maybe…) encounter the stated fps bug (3.0 kB)

ethermammoth · December 5, 2013, 2:55pm

Had a similar issue in a recent project where we used windowed full screen (with hidden window frame). sometimes it seemed that framerates dropped significantly.
Closing the main renderer and reopening solved the issue, which seems to be related to what you described.
I didn’t really have time to investigate further, but it seemed to me that when saving the renderer patch without window borders this problem arose. Maybe related to a wrong size or position going out of the screen area.