Updates Jan 27th 2020 - Catalina & more

[Hanz Meyzer]

Maybe an hidden switch in config.xml, so people can try?

[Urs]

Maybe an hidden switch in config.xml, so people can try?

Sure, something, we'll see.

[Hanz Meyzer]

...Or finding the cause why it is then so slow in Hive? I guess macos will decide if something is drawn by GPU or CPU, based on the used API calls or so?

[Urs]

...Or finding the cause why it is then so slow in Hive? I guess macos will decide if something is drawn by GPU or CPU, based on the used API calls or so?

There are two bottlenecks: Bitmaps transferred to GPU and complex vector graphics drawn by software renderer. Zebra seems to have small enough bitmaps and simple enough vector graphics for the system to do/keep on the GPU. But it only does that with the threaded UI rendering. Cool.

Hive has the scope and complex graphs which don't render on the GPU. But our own software renderer outperforms Apple's by a magnitude, so we use this to draw graphs into out own bitmaps (which is called an offscreen context). That however is slower with the multithreaded UI rendering than with the non-multithreaded we currently use. Not cool.

We can try to get rid of our own drawing and see if that's any faster again. But then of course we'll lose some neat effects (glow and stuff), and we need to write extra code to clip the paths. Path clipping is non-trivial and might put extra burden on CPU/GPU. We currently use an alpha mask, which is essentially cost free in terms of CPU, but only works with offscreen contexts. D'oh.

[Hanz Meyzer]

Thanks for the insight. And can't you draw the whole hive gui minus custom code graphs and then draw the custom graphs to another "cgcontext/baselayer" using another thread, and then blit-copy that layer onto the gui?

[Urs]

Hehehe, I basically spent my summer holidays clipping cubic spline based paths (thing Shape Sequencer) to hexagons, while my wife went to the beach.

Back now, cleaning up a bit and hopeful that this may help us keep things speedy. Clipping the Scope to a hexagon should be endlessly easier, but then again, we do not know how much speed up there is for complex paths as opposed to cubic splines.

[teilo]

Just reticulate your splines, and you should be fine.

[M32]

if i want to update Repro on windows, do i just run the installer? no issues installing over the older version? or do i need to uninstall first?

[tasmaniandevil]

if i want to update Repro on windows, do i just run the installer? no issues installing over the older version? or do i need to uninstall first?

Yes, just run the installer.
During installation please have a look at the suggested installation paths, making sure they are the ones where Repro is currently installed, so all files can be properly replaced with the new version.