CloverFlow Performance Issue

[andreycout]

Hi guys. I just purchased my license after watching this video: 

 

This view is what sold me on the frontend. However, after importing my collection, it seems that this particular view runs very slow on my PC. The framerate drops considerably, to a point where scrolling becomes very sluggish and nowhere near as fast as on the video example (I'm guessing it goes  little bit below 30fps). I even tested with smaller collections, or collections that don't have any images, but even just scrolling the same default missing boxart image (the launchbox logo thing) over and over still makes it just as slow as if there are actual boxarts there. 

 

I'm running Windows 7 on an I5-2450m (2.50GHZ) cpu, 8GB of RAM, with a GT 650m gpu. I've tried setting the image cache size up the maximum value (4gbs) to see if it helps, but no dice. Any suggestions?

[Jason Carr]

Hmm, yeah, it seems like you should have decent performance with that hardware. The first thing I would try is to make sure you have the latest version of .NET installed, version 4.6.1. Also, unfortunately Windows 7 may be less performant than Windows 8 or Windows 10 due to lots of performance Microsoft has made in the later OS releases. That said, I wouldn't think it would be that drastic, either. Let me know if you're already up to date and we can dive deeper.

Also, thanks for the purchase. I hope we can get it figured out but rest assured that if we can't, I'm happy to send you out a refund.

[Rincewind]

Hi Andreycout, I'm using a very old Pc in my cabinet (core2 duo 3ghz, just 4gb ram) and to get it to run smoother first I scrolled the list to make sure all the images cached, I don't know if it works like that but it seemed to help.

I also found a massive speed increase when I transferred over to a SSD so much so I decided to keep the computer.

One other thing is the image quality setting but I can't confirm this works in BigBox maybe someone else can.

[Jason Carr]

Thanks @Rincewind. Yes, there are image quality settings in Big Box that might help. And yes, it's important to wait until all of the images are cached before judging the overall performance.

[UncleDaddySwiss]

Hi, i also just bought a license the other night, and can confirm that even on the lowest image quality the performance is very sluggish. I'm running on i7-4770K, 8GB memory, and MSI GeForce GTX 780 video card. I haven't actually cycled through all games yet, I'll give that a try. But just wanted to confirm, so far. 

Oh, and Windows 10 Pro x64

Edited August 13, 2016 by UncleDaddySwiss
More info

[Jason Carr]

Most likely this is because the images are still caching. Let me know if you're still seeing performance issues after all the images are cached. Also, is it only the CoverFlow views that are sluggish?

[UncleDaddySwiss]

Haven't had a lot of time to play with it yet, but so far that's the only view I've noticed it in. 

[DOS76]

I have an i7 4770K with 16GB of RAM and a GTX960 in my bedroom BigBox has 19K games and I don't have any kind of performance issue with mine Windows 10 Anniversary Update

[imdavid555]

Have been so busy setuping up systems and not actually playing reminded about my Big Box issues using coverflow:

I reported about it here. Pretty much scrolling through the coverflow view will cause massive lag. Have tried moving to an SSD but still saw the issues there as well. And when it happens BigBox will take a huge amount of space on my ram. I have seen it go past 5GB before (there are some pics in the thread).

 

have only been using the text with details view where it is very stable there.

[Jason Carr]

Thanks David, I'll be focusing on these issues early next week.

[UncleDaddySwiss]

Hey, been playing around with it for a while tonight and performance seems much better, probably needed to cache, but just noticed that under each platform separately, images appear fine, but when i go under View all games, images don't even try to load. They are all the default "No image" images. Strange. 

[Jason Carr]

Thank you Swiss. We have two threads going here now that are basically about the same issue. Here's the other thread:

I just put out a new beta that resolves a lot of issues with the VLC video playback engine, including a memory leak. I'm not certain that it has anything to do with the CoverFlow performance issues here, but it's worth testing to see. I'll be back to this issue tomorrow.

[imdavid555]

Thanks Jason! Looks like it hasn't made much of a difference though.

[Jason Carr]

Alright, thanks guys, the issue with View All Games not showing images in the CoverFlow views is actually different than anything else, and I just fixed that for the next beta, which should be out later today. That one in particular was an easy fix.

The performance issues should be improved as well for the next beta; I'm convinced that they are largely just because the images are being cached in the background. I've changed the priority of the background caching thread to hopefully not affect the performance of CoverFlow as much while the images are being cached. However, we may not be able to achieve 100% performance while the caching is under way. Thankfully, though, the images shouldn't need to cache again after the initial population.

I am moving on to the other thread to work on some of the other oddities, such as disappearing images. The new beta with these fixes should be out later today.

[imdavid555]

@Jason Carr

 

[imdavid555]

Hey Jason here is the video as promised. I am on the latest beta and deleted the entire cache folder. Then I cycled through SNES all the way through to get those images cached again. Then I started recording.

In the first video I am just holding the right key on the keyboard. Gets really choppy including the game video as well. Once I select the game and the game video shows again, it runs like it should.

Second video, I am just holding the key to go in one direction pretty much. I have removed clear logos, almost all videos, and background. Only the boxes to see what happens.

[Jason Carr]

I see, thanks David. I see similar results on machines without decent video cards (though the frame rates are much better than that). It seems like somehow video acceleration is turned off in Big Box, or something of that nature. I think it's possible to turn it off for the Windows OS interfaces, which would probably also affect WPF and Big Box. Any chance that could be turned off? Or maybe is there a video driver update available?

[imdavid555]

I have an AMD HD Radeon 7850 2gb graphics card. Handles Killer Instinct and Street Fighter V pretty well. Just checked and I am on the latest drivers for it.

I just used IO Bit Driver booster to update all my driver, still the same.

Looks like the issue is happening in my Test setup of LaunchBox as well. I placed it in a zip and uploaded to MediaFire.

[Jason Carr]

Hi David, just to 100% check to make sure, see what you find for the Windows desktop hardware acceleration settings:

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/hardware-acceleration-windows-7

You may or may not even be able to get to them, with my understanding. There's a registry key later on in the article though; it would be interesting to know what that registry key is set to. I'm really confused as to what else might be going on here, so I'm admittedly grasping at straws. Thanks for bearing with me on this though.

[imdavid555]

Thanks Jason. Appreciate the help! I was actually looking at that exact page last night, but unfortunately I don't have that setting. Will take a look at the registry portion though and let you know.