Massive Skin Rendering performance
Posted: May 19th, 2009, 10:19 pm
There are a couple non-discussed issues that may possibly, in the future, start to disrupt Xion alot.
For one, Font AA performance, is poor in certain situations.
I never noticed this until today, when i reopened a full screen project i put on hold and added a couple things to it.
Then i noticed an incredible slowdown, and realised it was the title of the song. Since it was too long for the title box and pretty huge in size, it started scrolling. An AA-d font that scrolls, takes ALOT of performance away. You can only notice this if you have a good eye for Frame Per Second evaluation. Looking at the task manager, there was no change between having a large font scroll, or not.
Second thing, is that the bigger it gets, the more power a skin requires, it seems. It doesn't sound like a big thing, because all the usual sized skins barely take anything at all, but the amount of necessary power goes up very steeply from a certain point.
A skin that is designed to work on a 1280x1024 resolution, has three track lines that are keyworded to display AA-d fonts at a large scale, two time layers, also at a ridiculous size, and a visualization layer, puts the CPU usage at 40%. Considering the functionality of the player is rather small, and scrolling titles makes it even worse, this creates a problem for those who want to create skins at large sizes, as there is too much of a performance drop to include all features available / wanted to implement into the skin.
I don't know how much these things have been optimized, or if they even CAN be optimized any fruther, but if possible, some workarounds may have to be found for this.
For one, Font AA performance, is poor in certain situations.
I never noticed this until today, when i reopened a full screen project i put on hold and added a couple things to it.
Then i noticed an incredible slowdown, and realised it was the title of the song. Since it was too long for the title box and pretty huge in size, it started scrolling. An AA-d font that scrolls, takes ALOT of performance away. You can only notice this if you have a good eye for Frame Per Second evaluation. Looking at the task manager, there was no change between having a large font scroll, or not.
Second thing, is that the bigger it gets, the more power a skin requires, it seems. It doesn't sound like a big thing, because all the usual sized skins barely take anything at all, but the amount of necessary power goes up very steeply from a certain point.
A skin that is designed to work on a 1280x1024 resolution, has three track lines that are keyworded to display AA-d fonts at a large scale, two time layers, also at a ridiculous size, and a visualization layer, puts the CPU usage at 40%. Considering the functionality of the player is rather small, and scrolling titles makes it even worse, this creates a problem for those who want to create skins at large sizes, as there is too much of a performance drop to include all features available / wanted to implement into the skin.
I don't know how much these things have been optimized, or if they even CAN be optimized any fruther, but if possible, some workarounds may have to be found for this.