Coverflow not smooth on powerful computer

[Immortal Chortle]

There must be a common denominator between our computers causing this. I dont want to revert to an older program and am very interested in finding a solution.

[Lordmonkus]

There is something going on here. I can only repeat what I have stated earlier in this thread.

I use the latest non beta build on 2 different systems, one a fairly decent upper mid end gaming PC and the other a really old low end (by todays standards) PC. Both use the stock theme and basic view, the one with just the text list and showing only box art and screen shots. I don't use clear logo wheel art or video files, I have all animations turned off and picture quality set to medium on the low end PC.

Even using the "cover flow" view with all the box arts on screen scrolling by things move along smoothly after caching all the art in.

I have no idea if there is an issue with the beta or a 3rd party theme or not. But if you use just the settings I use in the latest non beta and still have performance issues then you have something else going on in your PC. I know that is not an answer anyone will want to hear but it is all that is is left.

[Immortal Chortle]

 

3 minutes ago, lordmonkus said:

There is something going on here. I can only repeat what I have stated earlier in this thread.

I use the latest non beta build on 2 different systems, one a fairly decent upper mid end gaming PC and the other a really old low end (by todays standards) PC. Both use the stock theme and basic view, the one with just the text list and showing only box art and screen shots. I don't use clear logo wheel art or video files, I have all animations turned off and picture quality set to medium on the low end PC.

Even using the "cover flow" view with all the box arts on screen scrolling by things move along smoothly after caching all the art in.

I have no idea if there is an issue with the beta or a 3rd party theme or not. But if you use just the settings I use in the latest non beta and still have performance issues then you have something else going on in your PC. I know that is not an answer anyone will want to hear but it is all that is is left.

You said it ran fine on your Win 7 32x? All the PCs I have had performance issues on were 64x. By show of hands how many of you are having trouble on a 64x system?

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah my lower end HTPC is running the 32-bit version of Windows 7 and it also only has 2 gigs of ram.

My main gaming rig with is obviously higher end, AMD 8350 @ 4GHz, 16 gigs ram, Windows 8.1 64 bit.

Both systems are fine using the non latest non beta and no third party themes.

[DOS76]

Just tested using CoverFlow with my i7 4700K in my bedroom 16GB of RAM Windows 10 64 bit and coverflow is butter smooth on here.

[jinxist]

So is it my CPU that isn't able to haul this thing? an i5 6400 2.4Ghz? Or is it I don't have enough RAM at 8Gbs? There HAS to be a solution. Someone must have some suggestions for fixing this...

[DOS76]

I have 4 i5's I can test it on later 2 have 6500's one is a 3330 and the other is a mobile chip that I don't recall its number all run BB but I would have to test them using CoverFlow.

Honestly though I don't think your specs are the issue and that there must be some underlying issue. Mostly every one on this thread has a system that shouldn't be causing them issues. I run BB on a tablet with an Atom and 1GB of RAM now I won't say that the performance is stellar or anything but it is at least usable although I wouldn't attempt it with CoverFlow

Tested it on i5 3330 8GB RAM still works great.

Edited December 5, 2016 by DOS76

[half-fast]

I have to chime in and say I'm having not the smoothest performance either.  I'm on Win 10(64-bit obviously).  I have a i5 6600K OC'd to 4.5 Ghz, and a AMD Fury X with 16 GB of system ram.  Needless to say, far from a mediocre system, and coverflow, and pretty much every screen is a bit laggy.  I've got effects turned down, Image quality set to Medium, and the difference is negligible.  There has got to be a problem underlying.  I love this software, but right now, it;s usable, but frustrating.

[Lordmonkus]

To the people with issues I have to wonder what sort of software you have running in the background that could be eating up ram and cpu cycles ?

I will not comment on the beta version because I am not using it. But I will say that if you are running the non beta stable release and you are running into slowness you have to be having something else running to slow down the performance of Launchbox. I know that Launchbox is not the fastest and most light weight front end out there but it is by no means as slow and sluggish as some people here in this thread are saying. I have posted the specs of 2 computers I have running LB and one is quite obviously old and slow and LB runs just fine.

Please open your task manager and look at your systems ram and cpu usage.

Just for reference here's my task manager with ram and cpu usage with Launchbox and Firefox open.

 

[Peridot]

I've been having this issue since I bought launchbox around 6/7 months ago. First of all, these are my specs:

• AMD FX-8350 @ 4.2ghz
• 16gb RAM ddr3
• Gforce GTX 580 x 2 SLI
• Windows 10 Pro

I can run games like Witcher 3 and Dolphin at 60fps with no issues so I don't think it's a power problem. 

I have massive stuttering going from one game to the next. It's like it freezes for 1/4 of a second until it loads "something". It's not only a coverflow issue, even in the main menu the platform wheel art stutters pretty badly when I scroll.  It's not a cache issue either, I tried having only one system with 10 games and the performance was still bad. The only view that runs perfectly is this one:

  

No stutters there, even the transitions work perfectly.

 

Trying to narrow down the issue, here are the things that I've tried:

• Formatted C: drive and installed Windows 10 from scratch.
• Re-Installed Launchbox on SSD.
• Disabled SLI
• Force triple buffer / vsync in the drivers.
• Lock 60fps with Rivatuner.
• Tried both 60hz and 120hz.
• Force CPU to run in performance mode.
• Gave Big Box admin rights.
• Run Big Box in compatibility mode.
• Disabled display scaling.
• Updated GPU drivers.
• Disabled all those useless Windows 10 services. 
• Lowered the quality of the covers.
• Disabled all the transitions.
• Lowered Big Box framerate to 30.

I honestly have no idea what's the problem. CPU and RAM performance seem fine:

 

GPU goes crazy though:

So I dunno, that has been my experience with the issue so far. Any ideas are welcome. 

 

Edited December 7, 2016 by Peridot

[Lordmonkus]

Here's my GPU usage running in BigBox mode, I have a GTX 970.

This is using the coverflow view with all the boxarts and even videos playing. Scrolling was smooth along with switching systems, I was even switching to systems with the most games such as NES, Genesis, Snes.

[SentaiBrad]

I feel I should also re-post this as well; It's from a little while ago, but it was when performance was taking a hit by something in the code, and has since even come to perform a bit better. Let me be honest in saying that of course there are always things that Jason can do to improve performance, but I agree with Monkus and Derek, something else is going on here, either a bug with your specific systems, or software that you have running interfering with LB / BB. I get lag hiccups every once in a while, but nothing to the descriptions I've seen here, but I also have a 30k library. Library size is the biggest factor to LB / BB performance slowing down, and in my honest experience if your library is small and it's performing that bad, then it's either the system or software interference, and we've established that some of you have half way decent machines capable of running the software.

The description to the video:

Quote

I keep seeing this question pop up about how much Disk usage and CPU usage LaunchBox takes, so I opened up Resource Monitor in Windows 10 and found out. I scrolled through and cached quite a bit of my Arcade platform, then switched over to Amiga. On the Amiga view I had quite a bit of it cached. I swapped to, waited a min, then scrolled down till I hit stuff that needed to be cached and these were my results.

LaunchBox peaked, once or twice, at 30-50mb/s of Disk I/O, but it really stayed around and averaged 7-10mb/s of Disk I/O. Even though that's clearly lower than the most conservative I/O numbers for Mechanical 5400 RPM drives, faster Mechanical drives or SSD's will still improve performance in certain cases on how fast it can handle the amount of threads. So it's not just about the raw I/O as we would have previously thought. It is also worth noting that the tests do show that CPU usage is an extremely key factor. The CPU is fast as it is, and can't go faster than the Hard Drive and vice versa. So upgrading both can improve performance.

The Hard Drive I used: https://i.imgur.com/RMPAL9S.png
Some things to note - I believe it is 5400 RPM as it's from an external case that I put inside my PC, and I went for size instead of raw speeds and my performance is still fine. More evidence for CPU being more important? Like I said above, an SSD or a fast Mechanical drive can help in other areas more than raw Read / Write, but this is generally the most "fought" over point of contention.

 

[half-fast]

I'm all for figuring this out.   will post some screens later when I'm not on my Linux laptop.  I just find it hard to believe that, if LB/BB is indeed mostly cpu reliant, that with a fairly fresh copy of Windows 10, on an i5 6600K that runs @ 4.5 Ghz, that I could be having problems when my idle cpu usage sits between 0% and 7%.  My idle RAM sits usually around 2GB, out of 16GB.  I find it strange that apparently something is eating up my cpu cycles, causing BB to perform worse, but, my BF1 can run on maxed settings with Supersampling at 150% and I still avg 100fps.  Rainbow Six siege - no different.  I'm primarily a Linux developer, and I dont pretend to know much about Windows development, or the inner workings of LB/BB, for which I havent even looked into, but it seems like if BB isn't utilizing OpenGL for everything, it could really use it.  I'm not suggesting I know more or could fix BB, just a suggestion.

On one hand, I can totally understand and respect that the devs are saying from their experience that there must be something eating up cpu cycles ergo negatively affecting performance - I understand you can only test so many configuration, I've been there myself so I sympathize. On the other hand however, I have dozens of resource-demanding applications that run seamlessly(even mostly cpu-bound programs), even when I have several background tasks running, and BB is the only one that runs poorly ... literally.  Without benchmarking, I'd have to guess it runs between 15-30 fps, and gets a bit hung up upon changing screens and moving around swiftly.  

I'm one of those guys that turns off Windows services I don't need, and tweaks the system to get some better performance.  I have done that, but to be honest, these days, at least on my system, I don't see too much of a difference - normally only in startup time, as most less-common services seem to be set to manual or auto-triggered already anyway.

I don't even use LB/BB anymore, because it's such a nuisance.  I love the program, but starting to regret my purchase to be honest. I have games that have higher required specs, that run better on my quad core 1.8 Ghz laptop running Ubuntu 15.10.  Doesn't seem right.

Edited December 7, 2016 by half-fast

[Lordmonkus]

I get what you are saying and I am in no way trying to say that you aren't running into some sort of issues. But like I have said earlier in this thread, I have Launchbox running on a 10 year old AMD 2.2 Ghz cpu computer with 2 gigs of ram, Win 7 32-bit and an old 1 Gig Radeon GPU and it runs fine. Though I do keep it on the basic theme with the text game menu and all the animations turned off so, but it runs smooth. The library is also kept relatively small at around 1500 games.

Like I said, I am no way doubting you are having issues but when others are saying that there is no issues on their systems that by the looks of it are lower than yours then there has to be something else other than "Launchbox is slow because my computer is fast".

Also a fresh install of Windows is never as fast as it can be, there is a lot of shit that should be removed and turned off. Windows 10 is even worse than previous versions of Windows with all the telemetry bullshit.

 

[half-fast]

1 minute ago, lordmonkus said:

Quote

Also a fresh install of Windows is never as fast as it can be, there is a lot of shit that should be removed and turned off. Windows 10 is even worse than previous versions of Windows with all the telemetry bullshit.

Totally agree, I have all that stuff off, of course for performance but mostly for privacy.  I only wish I knew of a reliable way to shut updates off and make them fully manual like they used to be.  I used a registry hack, but it disabled updates permanently.

 

[Jason Carr]

Let me chime in here for a second and just share that yes, we are aware that CoverFlow performance is not ideal currently, even on some fairly fast machines. I apologize but I have not read this entire thread, so forgive me if I'm just repeating people here. If you happen to be using the Windows Media Player video playback engine, you may find that VLC is much quicker and causes less performance issues with CoverFlow.

CoverFlow is smooth on high-end systems, but it is surprisingly taxing right now on video cards. The CPU definitely matters but not as much as the video card for the CoverFlow frame rates. I have this on my plate to address.

[jinxist]

I'm going to be upgrading from a 970 to a 1070 soon...I'll see if this gets rid of the problems and update. 

[Lordmonkus]

1 minute ago, jinxist said:

I'm going to be upgrading from a 970 to a 1070 soon...I'll see if this gets rid of the problems and update. 

Extremely unlikely to have any effect but will be interested if it does.

[jinxist]

Just a question (and perhaps not best suited for this post) has there ever been thoughts or talks on a BB Lite? Something that is much less taxing? I mean, even if it only really had ONE layout (maybe you could change the colours or something I dunno) say, similar to the NES Classic menus. Just thinking out loud lol

[Lordmonkus]

"BB Lite" would be the configuration I use on my HTPC. Standard view with text list with only boxart and screen shots with all transition effects turned off. Maybe an option to just set it to this with a single toggle would be nice.