Performance optimization on a MacPro

[alvinpenworth]

Hi there,

I am working on a theater show that involves two live camera inputs and one projector.  Some of my patches are lagging heavily, down to 10-15 fps at times, and I'm trying to figure out who or what is slowing me down.

I am using a Mac Pro, OS 10.9, with 2 x 2.26Ghz QuadCore Intel Xeon processor, 24GB of ram, and two BlackMagic capture decks.  My graphics card is a NVidia GeForce GT 120 512MB.  Without using any tricks or effects I can use both cameras well (at Half Quality - 640x360 pixels).  But in a few patches, when things get complicated, using a combination of Core modules and regular Isadora modules (i use "Buffer" frequently), my frame rate drops off. 

Activity Monitor tells me that my CPU is 93% free and most of my RAM is unused.  So what is going wrong?  My performance bottleneck is the Graphics card, I assume, but is it possible to utilize the processing power I have to speed up performance?

thanks,

alvin

[lpipoz]

Hi,

the GT 120 is a really old GC, and 512MB is not a lot.

Core video did use your GC to do some processing.

And remember that "image to video" and "video to image" are heavy.

To use CPU power and not GPU power you should not use any CI or QC actors.

But remember that Izy is not really multithread friendly, except for playing movies ( before 1.3.1f06 with threaded movie playback, and without after), so you won't see a 400% CPU use in activity monitor, but max 130% when playing multiple movies.

hope this help

[alvinpenworth]

Thanks for the tip about "image to video" and "video to image".  By changing my entire scene to "video", taking out all the core actors, I actually ended up making the scene in question run smoothly.