BigBox lag throughout

[isaac8849]

Throughout the entirety of BigBox, I have slow and stuttery performance, and all the transitions are choppy.  My usage is practically nothing and I have a very good pc. Any ideas? on version 11.12

[C-Beats]

You experiencing this in the default theme, or are you using a different theme?

[isaac8849]

Hi, thanks for the reply, but the people on the subreddit helped me fix it, the main lag and stutter was do freesync, then it was also slighty better after turning off all settings in video menu. My issue was on any theme, but I'm currenty using Pulse which I like a lot

[blueoasis]

On 7/20/2021 at 11:15 AM, isaac8849 said:

Hi, thanks for the reply, but the people on the subreddit helped me fix it, the main lag and stutter was do freesync, then it was also slighty better after turning off all settings in video menu. My issue was on any theme, but I'm currenty using Pulse which I like a lot

Any chance you can elaborate on how you fixed this issue? I am also experiencing soul crushing lag in Big Box with an i9-9900k and a 3080ti running off an nvme drive. Everything was working fine on this setup until a couple of months ago and then it all went to crap. I thought I'd come back after the new release and with my new GPU and see if I faired any better, but nope.

[C-Beats]

6 hours ago, blueoasis said:

Any chance you can elaborate on how you fixed this issue? I am also experiencing soul crushing lag in Big Box with an i9-9900k and a 3080ti running off an nvme drive. Everything was working fine on this setup until a couple of months ago and then it all went to crap. I thought I'd come back after the new release and with my new GPU and see if I faired any better, but nope.

If you are talking about the animations not feeling smooth you can try to increase the refresh rate in Big Box options and this will make animations fire layout updates more often which could potentially help (assuming your CPU can keep up with the increased calculation requirements)

[blueoasis]

6 hours ago, C-Beats said:

If you are talking about the animations not feeling smooth you can try to increase the refresh rate in Big Box options and this will make animations fire layout updates more often which could potentially help (assuming your CPU can keep up with the increased calculation requirements)

My frame rate in Big Box was set to 60hz (My tv is capable of 120hz btw). I set it to 120hz and restarted Big Box and everything is exactly the same as before. The background animations on any theme look like they are running at about 5 fps and trying to flip through games in any cover flow based view takes about 3 seconds per game. I only have 1 system imported with about 190 games btw. I'm about ready to just reinstall Windows at this point.

Edited July 28, 2021 by blueoasis

[SiriusVI]

16 minutes ago, blueoasis said:

My frame rate in Big Box was set to 60hz (My tv is capable of 120hz btw). I set it to 120hz and restarted Big Box and everything is exactly the same as before. The background animations on any theme look like they are running at about 5 fps and trying to flip through games in any cover flow based view takes about 3 seconds per game. I only have 1 system imported with about 190 games btw. I'm about ready to just reinstall Windows at this point.

Search the forum, there are many people who have similar problems. Certain programs apparently cause issues with Launchbox, such as MSI Afterburner or other MSI products. Realtek software such as Nahimic are also named frequently. Certain USB devices apparently also can cause lag, so you could unplug all USB devices you have and then test if the lags go away.

[blueoasis]

So, I've disabled all 3rd party services mentioned, including MSI Afterburner & MalwareBytes. I've disconnected all 3 external usb drives. I've ran chkdisk and found no issues with the nvme that Big Box is installed to. I've read many threads about this issue and have implemented all their suggestions and still have the same performance issues.

[gandalfdandalf]

I was just curious if you were ever able to resolve this?  I am having the same issue.  Everything worked perfect, I left system on for a day came home and the lag/stuttering started.  Any insight is appreciated.  

[Truest1]

same issue here can seem to be able to figure out what could be causing this issue.

[haradooku]

This is still an issue.  I've looked through multiple topics and every single one is dead-ended without any resolution.  Navigating through bigbox has noticeable lag and stuttering no matter what theme I'm using.

[PaintNothing]

I was having this issue myself and I'm on a 13700k with RTX 4090 and 4tb Western Digital Black SN850x NVME Drive. I don't think its a hardware issue or drive issue. So I did some testing and think I've found a fix. Thought I'd share my discovery if it helps anyone and hopefully the developers can pick this up and possibly fix it.

So after trying just about everything I thought maybe it's got something to do with the file sizes, possibly even if a file is jpeg or png. What I did discover is that for example on NES, if you scrape your games in like normal, the box size dimensions (you can right click the file, select properties, details tab, scroll down you will see resolutions etc.) are very big. Some of my boxes were 5000 pixels in width. So i used an app called Faststone Photo resizer and decreased the box art down to below 2000 pixels but while also keeping the aspect ratio so it doesn't mess the file up. So same box just smaller in size. When i went back to big box and selected that game which always lagged and wasn't smooth on animation guess what.... Smooth as butter. So I think some of the art being scraped is way too big and it just can't load it in quick enough to animate smoothly. Reducing the box sizes on my entire system fixed all my issues. I'm also running 120hz mode too.

 

If someone can test this out on a system you are experiencing this on and report back I think it could be fixed.

 

Only problem i'm facing now is I have 28,000 plus images to look through and reduce resolutions on. Bit of a task but so far I've done 3-4 systems and they all animate smooth now with no problems.

[C-Beats]

22 minutes ago, PaintNothing said:

I was having this issue myself and I'm on a 13700k with RTX 4090 and 4tb Western Digital Black SN850x NVME Drive. I don't think its a hardware issue or drive issue. So I did some testing and think I've found a fix. Thought I'd share my discovery if it helps anyone and hopefully the developers can pick this up and possibly fix it.

So after trying just about everything I thought maybe it's got something to do with the file sizes, possibly even if a file is jpeg or png. What I did discover is that for example on NES, if you scrape your games in like normal, the box size dimensions (you can right click the file, select properties, details tab, scroll down you will see resolutions etc.) are very big. Some of my boxes were 5000 pixels in width. So i used an app called Faststone Photo resizer and decreased the box art down to below 2000 pixels but while also keeping the aspect ratio so it doesn't mess the file up. So same box just smaller in size. When i went back to big box and selected that game which always lagged and wasn't smooth on animation guess what.... Smooth as butter. So I think some of the art being scraped is way too big and it just can't load it in quick enough to animate smoothly. Reducing the box sizes on my entire system fixed all my issues. I'm also running 120hz mode too.

 

If someone can test this out on a system you are experiencing this on and report back I think it could be fixed.

 

Only problem i'm facing now is I have 28,000 plus images to look through and reduce resolutions on. Bit of a task but so far I've done 3-4 systems and they all animate smooth now with no problems.

This solution only helps if your image cache hasn't been built yet, or the theme in use doesn't use the image cache in the first place. LB/BB uses a cache system that loads your file then downscales it and saves it out to the cache folder, from then on the UI uses the cache image. Unless explicitly stated to do so the UI doesn't ever display the raw image in the UI (at least not for boxes).

In Big Box you can force the image cache process to pre-populate your cache. This process does take a while especially in larger libraries so is typically something you let run over night.