jmarkt | 14 years ago | 10 comments | 2,833 views

Anyone have an ideas as to why BT is playing in a jerky fashion? I have the latest version (7.6.5); I have an NVIDIA GeForce 8400gs (with updated drivers) which us supposed to be plenty capable; and I think I have the latest version of DirX (9.0)! When playing the last three shows posted, all slow down to about one frame per second approximately half way through. If I turn off Hardware Acceleration, they won't even load?




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Possible reasons;
Playing from External Hard drive.
Internal Hard disk slow down speed.
bad or overheat Graphic card
or bad latest driver.

Try roll back to old driver

bylaw, 14 years ago

When I play your last show (Text Explode), BT immediately goes to 98-99% CPU usage and uses 83.8 MB, when monitoring Task Manager program.

The actual playing time of your eight second show was 20 seconds (for the slider to reach the end)??

I'm not playing from an external HD, and I've updated drivers??? I have 2GB of RAM and a 2.00GHz processor, and everything else seems to be operating fine????

The NVIDIA card has 512 MB of memory - is that sufficient?

jmarkt, 14 years ago

Particule effects are using a lot of cpu and cpu usage grows with paticule max age parameter.

vincent, 14 years ago


In fact, older versions play those shows a lot smoother.

The reason is the particles budget. To make sure shows keep on performing in realtime, the maximum amount of particles is limited. It was once set to to 1000 particles per layer. Because our software has been optimized and hardware has become a lot faster it has been set to 10.000 in the current version.

For this reason older versions render less particles and play more smoothly (but also look less exciting)

On my ATI Radeon HD 4650 the last three shows posted play a steady 60 fps. If you want you can limit the amount of particles by using lower values for the EMISSION and MAXIMUM AGE properties.

michiel, 14 years ago


Reduced EMISSION & MAXIMUM AGE to almost nothing and results still very disappointing. About 3 1/2 seconds into it, BT begins to chug, ultimately taking 16 seconds to complete the eight second show. I replaced my old graphics card in order to accomodate pixel shader 3.0!

How can I determine, for comparative purposes, how many fps BT is playing this show? Also, is this card not up to the task?

jmarkt, 14 years ago

How old is the PC? The CMOS battery may be coming end of Life. Poor battery strength affects VGA performance.
The other factor maybe the directX. Try re-install the direct X.

I have seen this problem before and it's due to the VGA fan.
This case is the plastic film that covering the VGA closure peel
off and obstructing fan rotation.

Another case is a dirty VGA fan. Since it's a new card, this may not be the case.

Hope this help

bylaw, 14 years ago

I am sure your hardware isn't broken. It is simply not powerful enough to run extreme particle effects.

Have you reduced the EMISSION and MAXIMUM AGE properties for *all* keys and *all* layers? An easy way to do this is to flag the ALL LAYERS and ALL KEYS checkboxes above the 3 sliders before changing one of them.

And please understand that realtime performance does not affect the quality of the exported video file in any way.

michiel, 14 years ago


Thanks, Michiel, but I had "checked all the boxes" and I meant to mention that I had exported the show to avi and it worked fine. I guess I just didn't upgrade the graphics card as much as I thought.

Thanks too, Bylaw, for the input. The PC itself is old, but the motherboard/processors have been upgraded. Kind of like putting a Cobra engine in a 40 Ford - there's always issues. I did that once too, but didn't have a Forum to consult with!! :>)

jmarkt, 14 years ago

The general rule for old PC upgrade should only be faster and/or extra ram only.

If it's involved motherboard and processor, it's better to go for a completely new one.

Power supply unit may be your problem for poor performance.
Old and Not enough consistent power supply caused poor PC performance and will damaged motherboard and hard drives over a period of usage. This will surfaced as interminent weird problems.

bylaw, 14 years ago

I agree with bylaw. I have seen a similar case a while ago when I upgraded an old PC without upgrading the supply unit. The PC ran on a lower capacity.
One other area to look at is the cooling in your case. An old case may not provide enough cooling for new hardware.

Yousef, 14 years ago

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