• 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4(current)
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
Aeon based skins slow ?
#46
OK I ran png gauntlet on blacks aeon cut the media folder from 113 mb to 100mb.
But I could not see a difference on the debug info freemem/cpu. But I am wondering why does it need to run 59,8 FPS and 96% on the CPU. It is just standing there doing nothing - What it had to present on the screen was there....so I would have expected it to go down in FPS and CPU after a screen load?!?

/needtotest
Reply
#47
CPU load well followed this thread and that worked for me:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=54474


But now it gives med up to 300 FPS - is that good or bad. I think 30 would be fine. So maybe there is a way to set a maximum FPS allowed?

/needtotest
Reply
#48
needtotest Wrote:OK I ran png gauntlet on blacks aeon cut the media folder from 113 mb to 100mb.
But I could not see a difference on the debug info freemem/cpu. But I am wondering why does it need to run 59,8 FPS and 96% on the CPU. It is just standing there doing nothing - What it had to present on the screen was there....so I would have expected it to go down in FPS and CPU after a screen load?!?

/needtotest

That's sounds more like a hardware problem as I only get about 38% CPU on my old single core.
Reply
#49
For those who are suffering with lag or slowness in Aeon could you state you system layout. Even though one skin might run ok and another not, does not mean the slower skin is crippling the machine. It could mean the slower skin has just pushed the machine over the edge whereas the other skin could be just under that limit.

Personally I would say the extra gfx and display is affecting things. I am not sure how the gfx engine works on XBMC where it comes to alpha blending but there is more in aeon that would be blended over other skins. Take the cd/dvd cases for example these have alpha channels and will be alpha blended whereas the background fanart does not need alpha blending.


One thing non of you have mentioned is how your images are stored. This would make a difference on a system if for example you have all your menu fanart stored on a slow drive and it was pushed over the network to get to xbmc...

- Are you using slow hd's or solid state. SSD's remove need for defragging.

- Are you pushing your images over a 10mb, 100mb or 1gb network.

- if pushing over network are they coming from a slow hd on that networked machine.

- do you have disk indexing on or compression on on the machine where the images are stored.


This kind of information could also help to find out where your bottlenecks are.



My recomendations for speed.

Always strip drives. If you have storage of more than one drive you can get better read speeds by striping those 2 drives... about 60% of the original speed from my experience.

If you are about to replace your media rig drive consider a solid state. I am running 4 ssd's raid 0 @ 800mbs on my media rig and its blinding. With Tiny XP installed I can switch the machine on and once past bios posting I can boot into xbmc in just under 2 seconds.

Also ssd's will help with loading lots of skin images into memory and any caching for posters etc.

Always make sure your network is running at full capacity. If you have gb nics for example make sure they are pushing 1gb and not handshacking at 100mbs. You can check this 2 ways.

- If your router has lcd indicators to show 1 colour as 100mbs and anotehr to show 1gb.

- Go into your network settings. Select the nic configuration and check what speed is set. Check for half duplex or full duplex.

Basically make sure you are pushing the network to the limit.
Reply
#50
MrTourettes Wrote:If you are about to replace your media rig drive consider a solid state. I am running 4 ssd's raid 0 @ 800mbs on my media rig and its blinding. With Tiny XP installed I can switch the machine on and once past bios posting I can boot into xbmc in just under 2 seconds.

You either must be extremely rich or spend all the money you got into these SSDs. At least here in Switzerland they cost a fortune. I get a 1TB 3.5'' HDD for about 80€. If I want to get 1TB with SSDs it costs me 4x 500€ = 2000€ (taking the price of the cheapest SSD which isn't the fastest). But wait I forgot that I have more than 3 TB of data...
Furthermore if one of your SSDs crashes you are really f**ked Wink

I have all my HDDs directly attached using SATA2 in my HTPC so no network latency. As most of them just contain movies with huge filesizes I don't think that defragmentation would help.

But then again I only run on a AMD Athlon X2 BE-2400 with a Sapphire Radeon HD3450 Silent so not much power in there.
What I noticed is that I can't really use any other software on the computer when running XBMC (independent of what XBMCs does). But Aeon itself runs quite smooth. Scrolling through my movie collection at maximum speed just shows me the wrong posters but as far as I know that has nothing to do with lag.
The only issue I can report is that since one of the latest updates of Black's mod it takes 2-3 seconds to load the Multiplex view. I will test this with Hitcher's mod as well and see if it happens there as well. All other views load just fine.
Always read the online manual (wiki), FAQ (wiki) and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail Team Kodi members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules (wiki).
Please read the pages on troubleshooting (wiki) and bug reporting (wiki) before reporting issues.
Reply
#51
Montellese Wrote:You either must be extremely rich or spend all the money you got into these SSDs. At least here in Switzerland they cost a fortune. I get a 1TB 3.5'' HDD for about 80€. If I want to get 1TB with SSDs it costs me 4x 500€ = 2000€ (taking the price of the cheapest SSD which isn't the fastest). But wait I forgot that I have more than 3 TB of data...
Furthermore if one of your SSDs crashes you are really f**ked Wink

I have all my HDDs directly attached using SATA2 in my HTPC so no network latency. As most of them just contain movies with huge filesizes I don't think that defragmentation would help.

But then again I only run on a AMD Athlon X2 BE-2400 with a Sapphire Radeon HD3450 Silent so not much power in there.
What I noticed is that I can't really use any other software on the computer when running XBMC (independent of what XBMCs does). But Aeon itself runs quite smooth. Scrolling through my movie collection at maximum speed just shows me the wrong posters but as far as I know that has nothing to do with lag.
The only issue I can report is that since one of the latest updates of Black's mod it takes 2-3 seconds to load the Multiplex view. I will test this with Hitcher's mod as well and see if it happens there as well. All other views load just fine.


My SSD's on my media rig are only 32gb each as I do not store media on the media rig. I have a 16TB file server which stores my media and these are all sata 2. I do however strip them in groups of 2. I used to use raid 5 as backup but decided its safer to go with a complete backup. Basically what I do now is for every 2 x 1tb sata 2 raid 0 I then copy all the info onto seperate 1tb hd's and stick in safe.
Reply
#52
My new HTPC has this config:

HW:
PointOfView Nvidia ION mini-itx motherboard Atom 330 (NVIDIA-ION)
Intel Atom N330 Dual Core prosessor
TRANSCEND 2GB DDR2 DIMM 800MHz (JM800QLU-2G)
G.SKILL 64GB SSD 2.5" SATA-II MLC (FM-25S2S-64GB)

SW:
Linux Jaunty 9.04 (xbmc live)
Reply
#53
@MrTourettes: So can u confirm that AEON runs smoother with SSD?

It's, I am building a HTPC right now, and thinking of buying a SSD for the OS and XBMC only.
I know the OS boots much faster and the programs as well, but I don´t reebot so much so only for that would be to expensive ;-)

If the SSD does not help to run AEON better I am thinking of buying a small 2,5" for the OS to save money.
Reply
#54
Frozone Wrote:@MrTourettes: So can u confirm that AEON runs smoother with SSD?

It's, I am building a HTPC right now, and thinking of buying a SSD for the OS and XBMC only.
I know the OS boots much faster and the programs as well, but I don´t reebot so much so only for that would be to expensive ;-)

If the SSD does not help to run AEON better I am thinking of buying a small 2,5" for the OS to save money.

Right I cannot confirm it will run things smoothly for you it all depends on the rest of the system.

Basically an SSD is better than a normal sata 2 drive. But that is also like saying an ATI 4890 is better than having an ATI 1900 or an Intel Core 2 @ 3ghz is better than having a 2ghz AMD cpu.

NO individual component will make somethign run smoothly its a combination of having everything capable of running it smoothly. Each part can be inproved and an SSD is ( in my case ) a lot better.

For anyone going for SSD's then again like with any drive always consider going for a drive 1/2 the size but getting 2 of them. Running 2 drives in Raid 0 is always better than running a single drive.
Reply
#55
The rest will be Zotac ION 330. And I am thinking of buying the new OCZ Agility. (not the fastest, but for 100€ I think will help to improve overall performance.

Will not buy 2 for the OS. Beacause for the OS I only need 10GB (20GB if Win and Linux)
And SSD is not only for read and write time,a lot for response-time and this will not get better with raid.
Reply
#56
I don't think you'll find any difference from the compression on the skin's PNG files. Remember that all PNGs have to be decompressed to WxHx4 before sending them to the GPU and the GPU will often allocate a larger amount of memory to hold them, for the purpose of alignment and such.

Also having tons of small textures is generally a bad thing for performance, both on the GPU and the loader. You have to open a file (the seek to + open = probably longer than the read), read, decompress into memory, gentexture, upload to GPU. Now when you go to use it, you're thrashing the GPU cache because you keep swapping out textures. Does XBMC support texture sheets, where you load one image that has a bunch of your details on it, then you carve it up by UV coodrinates for each control? That could help too.
Reply
#57
Well my spec with a SSD disk still gives me no smooth aeon experience.

CapnBry is onto something - the amount of textures in aeon is huge compared to other skins. All the texture swapping probably causes aeon to take a performance hit.

Im currently investigating some animation stuff also.
PointOfView Nvidia ION Atom 330 - TRANSCEND 2GB DDR2 DIMM 800MHz - G.SKILL 64GB SSD 2.5
Open Elec Beta4 1.95.4
XBMC Online Manual - HOW-TO post about a problem in a useful manner - Create/View Bug Report
Setup/Fix correct resolution on XBMC/Ubuntu - Usefull linux terminal commands
Reply
#58
CapnBry Wrote:I don't think you'll find any difference from the compression on the skin's PNG files. Remember that all PNGs have to be decompressed to WxHx4 before sending them to the GPU and the GPU will often allocate a larger amount of memory to hold them, for the purpose of alignment and such.

Also having tons of small textures is generally a bad thing for performance, both on the GPU and the loader. You have to open a file (the seek to + open = probably longer than the read), read, decompress into memory, gentexture, upload to GPU. Now when you go to use it, you're thrashing the GPU cache because you keep swapping out textures. Does XBMC support texture sheets, where you load one image that has a bunch of your details on it, then you carve it up by UV coodrinates for each control? That could help too.

It only swaps out textures if there is not enough texture memory for them.

For example I have 1.5gb video memory on my card and I do not think the total textures that aeon uses comes near that.

Also the comment about seek to..... Only if you dont have SSD's... as ssd's have no seek time at all Wink
Reply
#59
The-Boxhead Wrote:Well my spec with a SSD disk still gives me no smooth aeon experience.

That's because of the very slow intel atom & the slow onboard nvidia... but most of all it's the cpu.
Reply
#60
I just enabled the Debug logging and played around with all the views a bit.

In Multiplex view my FPS never drops below 30 no matter what I do. CPU load goes up till 75% if I scroll through Movie Multiplex view as fast as possible. When doing nothing the CPU load used by XBMC is around 20%.

In Showcase my FPS is around 20, sometimes even lower. CPU load is about the same as in Multiplex view.

In List view FPS is around 30 when doing nothing, fast scrolling brings it down to 20.

Wall view is the worst. Idle FPS is around 20, fast scrolling between 10 and 15. CPU load goes up to 85%.

I use Black's mod and have Backdrops and Fanart on, all fanart 1920x1080, posters 1000x1500, MediaFlagging and DVD cases on as well so probably the most you can get from Aeon.

EDIT: Ok this is strange/funny: I turned off fanart and backdrops and the performance in Multiplex got a lot worse ?!?!
Always read the online manual (wiki), FAQ (wiki) and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail Team Kodi members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules (wiki).
Please read the pages on troubleshooting (wiki) and bug reporting (wiki) before reporting issues.
Reply
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4(current)
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7

Logout Mark Read Team Forum Stats Members Help
Aeon based skins slow ?0