BigBox performance issues - Slow

[Jason Carr]

@Mike69pt My apologies, I have been spotty in the last few days because of summer family things. What this probably boils to though if things are being choppy in Big Box is that your video card is the bottleneck. That's most often the issue with choppy graphics in Big Box. Unfortunately there's not a whole lot we can do to improve that. We're always working on performance, but we are limited to the performance that WPF can provide, which is the Microsoft technology that we use to render the graphics.

I don't know what your video card is in that machine but I'm guessing it's fairly underpowered for the graphics. We are more than happy to give you a refund if it's not working out for you. The only other thing that I can suggest is to use a more lightweight theme in Big Box. I'm not sure what theme you're using right now but that can make a huge difference as to the performance.

[Mike69pt]

These are my computer specs -  i5 5th Gen 8GB SSD, dedicated graphics card - 840M-4GB

The graphics card is not the best of the bunch obviously but it's not that bad with 4GB of dedicated memory. Thing is, it allows me to run any other frontend and many games without problems but still I understand that Launchbox might be more graphic intensive. I am using all the standard options/themes btw.

I would appreciate if a refund could be issued and I will keep an eye on this project and if it ever gets "lighter" I will definitely by it again.

Thanks

[SentaiBrad]

Unfortunately, most PC specs never come down to the number that is quoted for the spec. Graphics cards and CPU's tell you the VRAM and Ghz, but this isn't the only thing a GPU or CPU does that matters. Big Box hardly uses any VRAM in a 4GB pool. It's more about how fast your VRAM is, how many CUDA cores are available (if Nvidia), the memory bus, how many PCI lanes your motherboard has, and even down to the technology they used when making it it. When they went from the GTX 900 series to the 1000 series, they improved performance by 15% (17%? can't remember exactly), just by shrinking the die size on the GPU (slightly oversimplified). Knowing that you're on a laptop with some older CPU and GPU tech, I do have to agree with Jason that this is probably where the issue is for the most part. There are some Themes out there that would be considered a light version if you'd like to check them out, themes can change this up quite a lot. Lowering the image quality in Big Box a big (you'll need to reset the cache), and lowering the quality / type of transition will also help. I missed your specs in the first post or I would have mentioned this sooner.

[Mike69pt]

I understand and agree with what you say and I'm not trying to criticize the great work being done here, but if that's the case then people should be warned that Launchbox requires better specs than other similar software's.

 

[Massatomic]

I am not sure that is the issue @Mike69pt, its just a matter of working out a compromise that works for your machine.

I don't go and buy the latest AAA game title expecting to be able to run in on ultra and get 144fps, I know that I have to make some compromises in the graphics settings that get the game to a performance setting that I am happy with. People have bixbox running on a GPDwin and I doubt many people would be running desktops with small stats like that.

I was thinking of a way to solve peoples performance issues, as there is so many options that can adversely affect performance, I was thinking may be a performance slider... Low - Med - High as an option in Bigbox. Choosing one of these pre determined options changes a number of settings to suit, eg transitions and image quality as brad mentioned. At least that would give us a base line to be able to troubleshoot performance issues. 

[DOS76]

I don't agree that its because your specs are to old there is probably some conflict somewhere. I've just been playing with BB on a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop with a Core 2 Duo T8300 4GB of RAM and built in graphics that predate the HD series and with transitions turned off it works fine maybe a slight wait for cover art to change but this is a 10 year old laptop and my expectations for it are realistic. Occasionally there are people with high spec machines that have issues and we've had a really difficult time in figuring out what is causing it. Are you running AV software, MSI Afterburner these have been known to cause performance issues especially after the Creators Update for Windows 10 (if you are even running it since I don't think we've discussed your OS)

Edited June 15, 2017 by DOS76

[Mike69pt]

5 minutes ago, DOS76 said:

I don't agree that its because your specs are to old there is probably some conflict somewhere. I've just been playing with BB on a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop with a Core 2 Duo T8300 4GB or RAM and built in graphics that predate the HD series and with transitions turned off it works fine maybe a slight wait for cover art to change but this is a 10 year old laptop and my expectations for it are realistic. Occasionally there are people with high spec machines that have issues and we've had a really difficult time in figuring out what is causing it. Are you running AV software, MSI Afterburner these have been known to cause performance issues especially after the Creators Update for Windows 10 (if you are even running it since I don't think we've discussed your OS)

You're spot on with this comment! That's what I think also from reading the forums.

I have tried shutting Bitdefender and I don't have Afterburner installed. I am with W10 creators update.

 

 

[Charco]

42 minutes ago, massatomic said:

I was thinking may be a performance slider... Low - Med - High as an option in Bigbox. Choosing one of these pre determined options changes a number of settings to suit, eg transitions and image quality as brad mentioned. At least that would give us a base line to be able to troubleshoot performance issues. 

That's not a bad suggestion at all actually.

[spectral]

Its possible its the Win 10 creator update. Like with the anniversary update when that was released it seems to be causing random problems in various programs, games, drivers,etc. It takes some time for it all to settle into place as updates are released. It also seems far more common to cause random bugs if you install it as an update over your existing OS rather than a clean install. It's the main reason I use the defer updates option to stop windows installing them (only stops the big AU/CU type not standard fixes,etc). I had major problems with the AU with massive screen tearing when scrolling in any web browser aswell as in the steam UI. Tried it again 6 months later and it was fine.

Edited June 15, 2017 by spectral

[SentaiBrad]

I would lean towards the Creators Update too, that caused some issues. I honestly upgraded with no issue besides it wanting to uninstall a few programs, but everything else was fine on my end. I've seen many issues after the update though, and only a few solutions MIGHT fix the problem for some people.