[gizmotoy]

I'm running RC1 and the latest Aeon Nox from Git, and I'm noticing low frame rates when I navigate into the Movies and TV Shows categories. I have these set to display as Shift and Wall, respectively. I get a solid 60fps elsewhere in the interface, but that plummets to around 30fps in those categories when displaying posters and fanart. I've even tried turning dirty regions on. This had no effect.

The frame rate does not appear to be effected by navigation. Even if it's sitting still and idle, it's still refreshing at 30fps, which from my understanding should not be the case if dirty regions is on. Interestingly, if I then press "s" on a keyboard to bring up the power menu, the Movie or TV Shows scroll fades slightly and has a texture applied while the power menu is shown. In this case, the screen redraws at 60fps.

It does effect the smoothness of the UI a bit: I wouldn't call it choppy, but it's not smooth, either. The other menus are very smooth.

My machine is running Windows 8 off a SSD with a 2.5GHz i5 and a 256MB Radeon 6630M with 4GB of system RAM, so I hadn't really expected frame rate issues. CPU never spikes above 12%. Any idea what is going on?

One other note: Background effect is off.

Here's my log: http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=20990

[corpgator]

I'm running basically the same rig as you except I've got an HD6870, a much beefier card, and 8GB of ram. I experience the same frame rate drops as you do and if I scroll through my music by holding down one of the arrows, it completely wigs out and all the thumbs and the backgrounds get stuck on one image. I have to either wait 30 secs or so for the system to catch up or sometimes even exit out and come back into XBMC.

So yeah, definitely something going on with how things are being drawn to the screen.

[e2zippo]

I have the same issues, though my system is not as beefy as yours. It's smoother on other skins.

[mikkelnl]

I'm experiencing the same choppy framerates in some areas, mostly in these situations:

- Browsing main menu: low framerate / choppy animation when a widget is shown.
- TV shows: when browsing through series (I'm using Big Fan view).

In 3.6.1, using Eden, everything was extremely smooth.

I thought it might be the simple fact that Frodo + Nox 4 need better hardware, but I tried the Xperience1080 beta skin, which animates extreme smooth. And because it works very nicely in 3.6.1, I think it might be Frodo RC, of WIP nox 4.0.

Maybe things will be OK when Frodo and Nox 4 are final, I hope so

[matt77303]

I have framerate issues on RC1 and the latest repo version of aeon nox, seems to be at its worse on the main menu when widgets are enabled.

System specs:

CPU - AMD Athlon™ II X2 Dual-Core 3.4Ghz
MB - ASUS M5A78L-M/USB3, Nvidia 610 2GB
RAM - 4GB DDR3 Dual-Channel
OS - XBMC Frodo

Matt

[mikkelnl]

I have framerate issues on RC1 and the latest repo version of aeon nox, seems to be at its worse on the main menu when widgets are enabled.

Exactly... like I said above: I also have this issue while using certain viewtpyes (big fan for instance).

I'm using this HTPC:
http://www.asrock.com/nettop/overview.nl...ifications

3.6.1. was very smooth, if final Frodo + Nox 4 won't solve the problem, I'll probably downgrade to Eden with 3.6.1.

[gizmotoy]

Well it looks like there's at least a few of us. I wonder if this affects everyone and we're the only ones that have noticed, or if there's something specific about our setups that is causing it.

A few days ago I posted about it in the main 4.0 thread in hopes that phil65 would notice and try to figure out what's going on, but I didn't get any response.

[matt77303]

im running xbmcbuntu gonna try a windows installation now.

Mine is smooth when the widgets are disabled so i wounder if its a issue there rather than nox.

matt

[Martijn]

No problems at all on openelec

[phil65]

No problems at all on openelec

me, too. (even on windows with a first-gen c2duo 2.1 ghz)

[gizmotoy]

No problems at all on openelec

me, too. (even on windows with a first-gen c2duo 2.1 ghz)

Hmm. So the Shift and Wall viewtypes both refresh at 60fps (or at least animate smoothly) for you under Windows with a C2Duo? Any idea what could be killing those on my machine? Maybe some kind of cache difference, or an advancedsetting you have enabled that would help? Could it be fanart-related? Maybe I should try turning that off, I only thought of that just now.

I'm not using widgets, and the main menus animate perfectly, it's just when it starts displaying posters/fanart that I have a problem.

I'm willing to help debug/dig through code, but I don't really know where to start.

[matt77303]

rc2 seems better to me


Matt

[gizmotoy]

RC2 did not resolve the issue for me. I did some digging with dirty regions and its visualization feature, and found something interesting. In the Shift and Wall views (and maybe others, I didn't try them), there appears to be a band that is getting redrawn at idle, even though nothing is animated. Opaque orange means it's redrawing as fast as it can. The light green means that there is some redrawing.

Ideally, there should be no orange/green on the screen at all (besides the debug text). I'm not sure what it's redrawing in that orange band.

Phil65, any ideas? The band persists when navigating the movie list, which I'm sure is contributing to my somewhat choppy navigation.

http://imgur.com/jwlDo
http://imgur.com/LsgEf

For comparison, this is a similar view in another skin (though it doesn't use fanart, so it's not an entirely 1:1 comparison).

http://imgur.com/dpf2m

Edit: Note that the screenshots are taken in a nearly full-size window merely for screenshot convenience (my media keyboard doesn't have a Print Screen button). The same behavior occurs when XBMC is in full screen mode.

[mikkelnl]

I'm using OpenELEC, and have these issues described above. I believe had the same issues when 3.5/3.6 was in development by the way - not sure though...

Again: 3.6.1. runs very smooth on my machine, so I guess there is something different between these versions that causes this - I really don't feel like it's the hardware being too low-end... I'm just guessing here, based on how smooth 3.6.1 and Xperience1080 run...

[BigNoid]

We have looked at dirty regions and improved it where necessary, but some design decisions were made that make redraw of the screen in certain places necessary. The orange band is an effect on the floor that gives contrast and a glow effect. We do not intent to make this version of the skin fully dirty regions free.
I doubt the dirty regions redraw is causing your fps drop though as none of us can reproduce it and I dont think this is a skin issue. We have taken customization in Nox to such a point that comparing to other skins is rather pointless. Customization means more code, more code means more resources being used. More resources means any problems you have are being magnified in this skin. I still have very low cpu usage though with this skin, around 7 to 8% when idle and full 60 fps everywhere, only dropping to 45 when changing windows.
That being said, in your case I would try to disable Aero first, then to toggle the true fullscreen setting.

---

I'm using OpenELEC, and have these issues described above. I believe had the same issues when 3.5/3.6 was in development by the way - not sure though...

Again: 3.6.1. runs very smooth on my machine, so I guess there is something different between these versions that causes this - I really don't feel like it's the hardware being too low-end... I'm just guessing here, based on how smooth 3.6.1 and Xperience1080 run...

Are you using a textures.xbt? That is probably the difference between 3.6.1/Xpererience1080 and 4.0 from github.