Backgrounds and Artwork loads slowly

I'm having an issue with XBMC where the background art and fan art takes a long time to load. Sometimes I'm left with no images at all. The issue started after I re-installed my operating system and XBMc about a month ago. I was using XBMC 10.1, but I've switched to a nightly build (12/5) and I'm still encountering the same issue.

My fan art is set up correctly, and while my custom background folder is on a different drive than XBMC, there's no computer reason for the slowdown.

Is there a way to possibly speed up the way XBMC reads these images so that they load quicker? I'm using a Athlon 64 3200+ PC with an ATI 2600 HD Pro video card and 1.5 gigs of ram.

-Nixed

If you set XBMC to use dds artwork in Advancedsettings.xml then that will allow your GPU to do most of the work when it comes to rendering artwork

Once enabled you need to scroll through your Movies/TV so XBMC can create a dds version of your artwork this doesn't happen very quickly so don't expect it to have instant results its not a bad idea to minimize xbmc while its doing this save using up CPU rendering XBMC GUI

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Adv...sfanart.3E

You can keep an eye on \userdata\Thumbnails\Video and your see it adding dds files for every tbn

Thank you for your advice. I created the advancesettings.xml file as suggested, and it seemed to help things overall. Fan art and my supplied backgrounds are loading faster and more frequently. The default xbmc supplied backgrounds for Video, Music, Weather, and Settings still don't show up as well, but I'm guessing it's because they need to all cached still?

I fixed it! A little trial and error. I turned off "Vertical Blank Sync" in my XBMC settings and all images seemed to appear including the default backgrounds. The computer was using too much CPU power to render them. I removed advancesettings.xml from /userdata and everything was lightning fast. I guess it's an issue with my GPU? Strange.

Thanks again for the suggestion.