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Slow down
Let me start off by saying I am still using the Demo version of PI. I am experiencing serious slow down using PI with only 1 or 2 particle emitters on the screen with an AVI file. I have a 2.8 ghz Pentium dual core with 4 gigs of RAM and an ATI Radeon SE 300X with 128 megs of RAM. Is that normal to see slow down/lock down? Or is my video card no good?
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9 Replies
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That’s not normal performance. I’m on a 3 year old computer with a 4 year old video card, and it’s only when I have a lot of particles on stage that I start to get slowdown.
It’s most likely that your drivers are the problem. Download the latest “certified” drivers from the ATI website.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
I also forgot to add that I have a 28 point blocker on the screen also. I downloaded the latest drivers for my card and I am basicaly getting slow down to the point of lock up on the PC. I also checked the FPS of the emitters in the load library menu and “some” of the emitters FPS, go up and down by a margin of 15 FPS. I have read the help topics and PI recognizes the my Open GL.
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You really need to give more information. I can create projects with 10 emitters that run at 30 fps, and I can easily create another project with a single emitter that will run at less than 1 fps on the fastest machine out there.
The key is the number of particles, not the number of emitters. In the status bar (at the bottom of pIllusion 3) there is a count of the emitters and particles that have been created — it looks like ” 3 : 2466 “. The first number is emitters, the second number is particles. How many particles are in the slow project?
Another slow-down factor is the frame number you’re working at. particleIllusion works best on short video clips (low frame numbers). If you’re working at frame number 5000, pIllusion will be slow even with a very simple emitter. The solution is to break your long shots up into shorter clips.
Alan.
wondertouch -
Blockers will slow things down a lot too. You can confirm that it’s the blocker slowing things down by deleting it and seeing if things speed up significantly. You can use UNDO to put it back.
Alan.
wondertouch -
Is PI written to take advantage of dual processors? I notice that my CPU usage never goes above 50% in the task manager when I play a clip with emitters, blockers, etc. but I still get a ton on slow down. I did change the priority level to high for PI in the task manager which stopped my mouse and keyboard from locking up but I still get the slow down. CPU utilization, still did not rise above %50.
The project is 300 frames and I am working at around frame 170. At its peak there is 2 emitters with 1932 particle
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No, it’s not, so 50% is all you’ll see on a dual-core system.
1900 particles is not a lot. On my old Inspiron 8500 laptop (you can find the specs online) if I add the “Boom 3 (Tom Granberg)” emitter — I think that one is in the demo library — at frame 120 there are about 22000 particles and I’m getting 10 fps.
The first thing to try is to get the latest drivers for your video card from ATI.com.
Alan.
wondertouch -
It seems as though the blocker is the cause for the slow down. I get around 15 FPS with the same emitter you tested with, really makes the machine lock up though, the frame scroll slider gets locked up and does not move smoothly. I do have the latest drivers for the card but I guess this graphics card is a piece of junk.
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On those bench tests you have #’s to the far left, what do they represent? FPS?
Why do the #’s differ on the 2nd test so much?
Did you use a certain emitter for all the test?
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If you’re talking about the pIllusionBench results page, the values are time in seconds — lower is faster.
Alan.
wondertouch
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