BigBox Performance and How to Make it Better

[Lordmonkus]

Are you having problems with Launchbox / BigBox running slow and choppy on your system ?

If you are then please help us out with your systems specs. CPU make and clockspeed, ram, hard drive, video card and operating system. Please also include how many games you have imported.

To further help us help you start out with just the stock BigBox theme, user created themes can cause issues. Also go through all your games to get them all cached, the initial caching of images can really slow things down at first.

There are things you can do to make sure your computer is running as smoothly as possible.

First, defragment your hard drive, especially if your drive is older. This probably won't be a big if any performance gain but it doesn't hurt to do it. SSD's do not need to be defragmented, and the process can damage the SSD.

Second, make sure all your drivers are up to date. @SentaiBradrecommends using Advanced System Care and Driver Booster. Driver Booster is included inside of ASC, which is inside the download here: http://www.iobit.com/en/advancedsystemcarefree.php Advanced System Care's main options should all be ran at least once, depending on your needs, but these 3 options are the recommended options to run every 24-72 hours, or as needed. IOBit's Uninstaller should also be used from the toolbox when removing software. This will help keep your PC clean in the long run as it will remove left over files that Windows or uninstallers won't get rid of.

Third, disable all unnecessary system services. This is a little bit more advanced but you can really gain extra performance by doing this. I use the guides on http://www.blackviper.com/ Make sure you follow the guide for your OS version and read what each service does before setting it to disabled. If in doubt of a service simply set it to manual instead of auto and it will get turned on by Windows if needed. One example of a service that is always on but in very rare cases do I think anyone using a computer for retrogaming needs is the Print Spool service. Of course if you use your computer for emulation and printing stuff then you will need this service on but there are many useless services turned on by default. Turning off what is unnecessary can free up a lot of ram and CPU cycles that Launchbox can use to run faster and smoother.

Fourth, in some cases a video codec could be causing troubles and @SentaiBradrecommends the K-Lite Codec Pack Standard found here: https://www.codecguide.com/download_k-lite_codec_pack_standard.htm Let it fix any problems it finds.

Fifth, disable 3rd party Anti-Virus and firewall software if this is a strict emulation computer and not used for anything beyond that.

Sixth, disable the background images. Users have reported that disabling these have helped them out with performance. This is something I have always just done out of personal aesthetic preference so I have never actually tested this.

Seventh, reduce image quality in BigBox. Setting to medium will help performance quite a lot while having very little to no impact on image quality.

If after doing all of these things you are still having problems then you may need to look at some LaunchBox tweaks. I mentioned earlier about using the stock BigBox theme, I use this one on my low powered HTPC build and it performs just fine. I use the text games and platforms list and not the logo art. I also use just the box art and screenshots, no video files. The coverflow view with several images on screen at the same time can cause problems if your system is lower powered. Another thing to do is set your image quality to Medium, you really won't notice much of a difference if any sitting back on the couch 6-8 feet away compared to the higher quality settings. Low quality will look pretty ugly and won't help much in terms of performance anyways.

You can also go into the Options and then under System > RAM Cache you can try different settings to see how they affect your setup. If you have slow ram or limited amount setting this this to a smaller amount can help in some cases. - No longer applicable since that has been removed.

Windows 10
If you are using Windows 10 and the Creators Update try disabling Fullscreen Optimizations by right clicking the BigBox executable and in the Compatibility tab at the bottom.

I came across this video recently and it has a lot of great suggestions to help boost performance in Windows 10. It does move along pretty quickly so you want to pause it from time to time and backtrack as necessary.

For reference I have Launchbox setup on 2 systems and things run fine on both.

System one:
Windows 8.1
AMD 8350 @ 4 GHz
16 gigs ram
GTX 970 graphics card
2 TB Western Digital Red
10,000+ games

Launchbox runs perfectly smooth on this system with full settings and any theme view.

System two:
Windows 7
AMD Athlon 3800+ @ 2.4 GHz
2 gigs ram
Radeon 7850 (1 gig DDR5 vram)
Some generic 160 gig hard drive
2500+ games

This computer is an old Acer PC that was my parents before they upgraded and by todays standards is pretty much a toaster. Using all the tweaks I mentioned above I have Launchbox with the stock theme and text based lists running very smooth.

[SupaDawg]

Working through this myself. Launchbox is running awful on my rig.

My specs:
Windows 10
Intel Core2 Duo E6750 2.66GHZ
4.00GB Ram
GeForce 210 (Fanless)
120GB M4 SSD
763 games

What's frustrating is that my install of Kodi runs flawlessly and is pretty soup-to-nuts with graphical features It seems that I'm asking a whole lot less of BigBox. I get that my CPU is a relic, but I thought it would be enough to push the BigBox GUI.

I'll try playing with the stock theme to see if I have any luck, but it's quite disappointing.

[Lordmonkus]

For that spec of a system stick to the stock theme with text list and single box view (not coverflow view). Turn off all the animations and set image quality to medium. As you can see in my 2nd system listed above it's lower spec than yours and BigBox runs fine.

[sw1fty808]

Big Box runs pretty well overall for me but the problem I am having is with launching games in cemu which are demanding on the system. A couple of Wii U games in cemu take a hell of a lot of power and it seems that big box is consuming too many resources to allow them both to run. They will run fine out of launchbox desktop though. I don't know if Big Box already does this to some extent but it would be nice if it could knock itself down to some kind of bare bones form temporarily while an emulator is running. If that makes sense.

Any suggestions?

[Lordmonkus]

Honestly you shouldn't even be looking at Cemu with that system. If you have Cemu running fine on those specs im shocked.

Edit:

Nevermind, didn't read closely, doing too much multitasking at the moment.

[DOS76]

I thought the same thing @lordmonkusand then I realized it wasn't the same poster

[Lordmonkus]

oh shit, lol

[sw1fty808]

The issue seems likely to be associated with the ram. Big Box is using approx 6x more ram than launchbox. I have 24gb ram in the system but certain games in cemu must need practically all of it. If I could knock back the ram usage in big box, that might do the trick.

In the guide above I see the thing about system ram cache but I can't find that option.

[prophecy0]

I have trouble with Big Box stuttering when I navigate through my game lists. I have less than 30 games total in Launchbox at the moment. My computer specs are as follows:

CPU: i7 4790k @ 4+GHz
RAM: 16GB DDR3 
GPU: GTX 980 Ti

Launchbox is installled on a Samsung EVO SSD. 

 

Here is a video of what the stuttering looks like. When navigating the platforms everything runs completely smooth, but when I navigate the game lists there is slowdown. It appears that the slowdown occurs when Launchbox is trying to load the background art. Is there any way to disable background art completely? I'm about to try deleting all but one piece of fanart for each game to see if that helps at all. 

 

edit: Deleting all but a single piece of fanart didn't help.

Edited January 31, 2017 by prophecy0

[igotdvds]

1 hour ago, prophecy0 said:

I have trouble with Big Box stuttering when I navigate through my game lists. I have less than 30 games total in Launchbox at the moment. My computer specs are as follows:

CPU: i7 4790k @ 4+GHz
RAM: 16GB DDR3 
GPU: GTX 980 Ti

Launchbox is installled on a Samsung EVO SSD. 

 

Here is a video of what the stuttering looks like. When navigating the platforms everything runs completely smooth, but when I navigate the game lists there is slowdown. It appears that the slowdown occurs when Launchbox is trying to load the background art. Is there any way to disable background art completely? I'm about to try deleting all but one piece of fanart for each game to see if that helps at all. 

 

edit: Deleting all but a single piece of fanart didn't help.

Are your images cached? (meaning) have you scrolled through that library multiple times. If you hover on one and then com back to it, does the stutter reoccur?

[prophecy0]

Yeah, I tried scrolling through multiple times and the stuttering was still occuring.

[jakielee]

On 1/30/2017 at 9:37 PM, prophecy0 said:

I have trouble with Big Box stuttering when I navigate through my game lists. I have less than 30 games total in Launchbox at the moment. My computer specs are as follows:

CPU: i7 4790k @ 4+GHz
RAM: 16GB DDR3 
GPU: GTX 980 Ti

Launchbox is installled on a Samsung EVO SSD. 

 

Here is a video of what the stuttering looks like. When navigating the platforms everything runs completely smooth, but when I navigate the game lists there is slowdown. It appears that the slowdown occurs when Launchbox is trying to load the background art. Is there any way to disable background art completely? I'm about to try deleting all but one piece of fanart for each game to see if that helps at all. 

 

edit: Deleting all but a single piece of fanart didn't help.

Had similar performance in Big Box games list and it seemed like the full screen fan art  was slowing things down.  I changed the background image setting in the LaunchBox desktop view options. I unchecked everything under backgrounds. Now the games list displays box art, clear logos, and screenshots and runs  smoother within Big Box. 

See if that helps. 

[Freestate]

Please vote https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/2472/auto-image-caching-for-performance

[prophecy0]

1 hour ago, jakielee said:

Had similar performance in Big Box games list and it seemed like the full screen fan art  was slowing things down.  I changed the background image setting in the LaunchBox desktop view options. I unchecked everything under backgrounds. Now the games list displays box art, clear logos, and screenshots and runs  smoother within Big Box. 

See if that helps. 

Thanks for the tip. Completely disabling backgrounds seems to have fixed everything, but only after I scrolled through all of the games in the wheel in order to let Big Box cache all of the boxart and screenshots.

 

49 minutes ago, Freestate said:

Please vote https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/2472/auto-image-caching-for-performance

Voted. I think this would be fantastic.

Edited February 1, 2017 by prophecy0

[Lordmonkus]

2 hours ago, jakielee said:

Had similar performance in Big Box games list and it seemed like the full screen fan art  was slowing things down.  I changed the background image setting in the LaunchBox desktop view options. I unchecked everything under backgrounds. Now the games list displays box art, clear logos, and screenshots and runs  smoother within Big Box. 

See if that helps. 

I will add this tip to the main post.

This is something I have always done right away just out of pure personal aesthetic reasons so I had never given any thought to this as a possible culprit of performance issues.

[Vox]

CPU: i7-2760QM
RAM: 8GB
GPU: Nvidia NVS 4200M
OS: Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
Imported: 1177

Just to add my own experience with BigBox 7.7, I noticed that changing most of the Options>Transitions settings to "None" helped improve the stutter on my machine. While not completely perfect, it works pretty well on my admittedly under powered machine.

[moudrost]

CPU: i7-6700K

RAM: 16GB

GPU: GTX-1080

OS: Windows 10 Home

Games: 60K+ currently imported

LaunchBox is installed on a 500GB SSD and the ROMs/images are being pulled from a Seagate 5TB HDD.  I started small and promptly fell in love so I instantly purchased a lifetime license followed by a lifetime EmuMovies sub.  The latter is probably going to cause me to move my LaunchBox install to a standard hard drive.  I have many systems left to import and I've already chewed through 100GB for related media.

I haven't used BigBox much, but the main interface has gotten progressively slower and is almost unusable.  Scrolling can take 10 seconds or more for the system to even begin displaying results.  Am I just reaching the limit of what I should be importing?  It was certainly not snappy  when I was in the 25K game range, but after loading my MAME set, that is when things went south.

[ResidentEvul13]

On 1/25/2017 at 9:33 PM, lordmonkus said:

Are you having problems with Launchbox / BigBox running slow and choppy on your system ?

If you are then please help us out with your systems specs. CPU make and clockspeed, ram, hard drive, video card and operating system. Please also include how many games you have imported.

To further help us help you start out with just the stock BigBox theme, user created themes can cause issues. Also go through all your games to get them all cached, the initial caching of images can really slow things down at first.

There are things you can do to make sure your computer is running as smoothly as possible.

First, defragment your hard drive, especially if your drive is older. This probably won't be a big if any performance gain but it doesn't hurt to do it. SSD's do not need to be defragmented, and the process can damage the SSD.

Second, make sure all your drivers are up to date. @SentaiBradrecommends using Advanced System Care and Driver Booster. Driver Booster is included inside of ASC, which is inside the. Download here: http://www.iobit.com/en/advancedsystemcarefree.php Advanced System Care's main options should all be ran at least once, depending on your needs, but these 3 options are the recommended options to run every 24-72 hours, or as needed. IOBit's Uninstaller should also be used from the toolbox when removing software. This will help keep your PC clean in the long run as it will remove left over files that Windows or uninstallers won't get rid of.

Third, disable all unnecessary system services. This is a little bit more advanced but you can really gain extra performance by doing this. I use the guides on http://www.blackviper.com/ Make sure you follow the guide for your OS version and read what each service does before setting it to disabled. If in doubt of a service simply set it to manual instead of auto and it will get turned on by Windows if needed. One example of a service that is always on but in very rare cases do I think anyone using a computer for retrogaming needs is the Print Spool service. Of course if you use your computer for emulation and printing stuff then you will need this service on but there are many useless services turned on by default. Turning off what is unnecessary can free up a lot of ram and CPU cycles that Launchbox can use to run faster and smoother.

Fourth, in some cases a video codec could be causing troubles and @SentaiBradrecommends the K-Lite Codec Pack Standard found here: https://www.codecguide.com/download_k-lite_codec_pack_standard.htm Let it fix any problems it finds.

Fifth, disable 3rd party Anti-Virus and firewall software if this is a strict emulation computer and not used for anything beyond that.

Sixth, disable the background images. Users have reported that disabling these have helped them out with performance. This is something I have always just done out of personal aesthetic preference so I have never actually tested this.

If after doing all of these things you are still having problems then you may need to look at some LaunchBox tweaks. I mentioned earlier about using the stock BigBox theme, I use this one on my low powered HTPC build and it performs just fine. I use the text games and platforms list and not the logo art. I also use just the box art and screenshots, no video files. The coverflow view with several images on screen at the same time can cause problems if your system is lower powered. Another thing to do is set your image quality to Medium, you really won't notice much of a difference if any sitting back on the couch 6-8 feet away compared to the higher quality settings. Low quality will look pretty ugly and won't help much in terms of performance anyways.

You can also go into the Options and then under System > RAM Cache you can try different settings to see how they affect your setup. If you have slow ram or limited amount setting this this to a smaller amount can help in some cases.

For reference I have Launchbox setup on 2 systems and things run fine on both.

System one:
Windows 8.1
AMD 8350 @ 4 GHz
16 gigs ram
GTX 970 graphics card
2 TB Western Digital Red
10,000+ games

Launchbox runs perfectly smooth on this system with full settings and any theme view.

System two:
Windows 7
AMD Athlon 3800+ @ 2.4 GHz
2 gigs ram
Radeon 7850 (1 gig DDR5 vram)
Some generic 160 gig hard drive
2500+ games

This computer is an old Acer PC that was my parents before they upgraded and by todays standards is pretty much a toaster. Using all the tweaks I mentioned above I have Launchbox with the stock theme and text based lists running very smooth.

I never knew this was here thank you so much!

[ckp]

It might be cool if LB had a single setting with various performance levels that adjusted all the many LB/BB settings that are related to performance based on the setting chosen, but could be overwritten in individual settings afterwords. So, maybe setting "Light" could give you all settings that would improve performance as much as could possibly be set in an automatic way (yes it could mean things will look uglier!). That could be used on a slower system up to super computer. The settings could still be tweaked individually. This new setting would just let you reset them to a chosen set of settings right then and there. Maybe also the ability to save your current custom settings as name xxx as well. Seems like a fairly simple development effort that could possibly help people out a lot.

[Lordmonkus]

I agree, a "light mode" toggle would be a very nice idea and I am sure there are people out there who would welcome it.