Magic Window Always Processing?

[callmetim]

Found Magic today, and been playing around with it a bit. It's pretty great. I have loaded a Shader, tweaked the parameters to my liking, and added an antialias filter at the final stage before output. However, my 4 year-old MacBook Pro is struggling to process the image, with the antialias filter on. I was hoping that closing the Magic Window would direct all the processing power to rendering out the video. But it appears that even when the Magic Window is closed, if I have the shader module active, my computer basically grinds to a halt. It seems that Magic is constantly processing the shader (and to that effect, the entire module?), even when paused (I'm using a .aiff file, and not live audio). Is there anyway for me to change this behavior so I am able to render with antialias on?

When I check Activity Monitor, CPU usage is under 5%, and Memory usage (or "pressure" as it's called now) is about half. I have a 15", early 2011 MBP, 2.2Ghz i7, 4 GB RAM, and the ATI Radeon HD 6750M with 1GB VRAM.

Thanks,
-Tim

[Magic]

Hi Tim, good question. The Antialias module is one of the most resource-intensive modules, so it can cause quite a slowdown on older machines. But, it seems to me that your system should be fast enough to handle it.

Can you go to Help > OpenGL Info, and copy/paste the first 4 lines for me to look at?

Also, when you go to Window > Magic Window Options, is the "Show Free Graphics Memory" option available?

I was hoping that closing the Magic Window would direct all the processing power to rendering out the video. But it appears that even when the Magic Window is closed, if I have the shader module active, my computer basically grinds to a halt.

The Magic Window is always rendering -- that's just the way it's designed. To handle live input, Magic actually behaves more like a game engine than a video or image editor. All the effects are rendered in real-time. There isn't any way to disable it unfortunately.

[callmetim]

Thanks for the fast reply, Eric. Here are the first 4 lines:

Version: 2.1 ATI-1.30.5
Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Maximum RGBA Texture Size: 8192x8192 pixels
Maximum Renderbuffer Size: 16384x16384 pixels

Also, the "Show Free Graphics Memory" option is not available for me.

[Magic]

Thanks Tim. Generally speaking, the problem you are describing is often indicative of low available graphics memory (VRAM). Though as I said before, I wouldn't expect a computer like yours to have such a problem. Is it possible you had a bunch of other applications open which were also using VRAM?

Or, here are some other ideas/questions:

• What OS X version are you running? I've had problems with the discrete ATI graphics on my Mac Mini, but only on older OS's. Mavericks and Yosemite seem to work better. Ironically, my MacBook Pro, which has integrated Intel graphics, works the best.
• Do you by chance have BootCamp installed on the same machine? It would be interesting to see if the Windows version of Magic had the same problem.
• It might be worth looking into a GPU monitoring app, so you can see what your VRAM usage is. Here's a relevant article I found: http://blog.conradchavez.com/2012/06/07 ... eo-memory/. There's lots of other good info in that article too.

Hope those things help.

Other than the Antialias module though, have you experienced any significant slowdowns?

[callmetim]

Hi Eric,

Thanks again for your help. I'm running 10.10.2. I wasn't running any other programs, except Safari and Activity Monitor. Unfortunately, I don't have bootcamp on this machine to test Magic in Windows. But, I tested a similar Magic scene on my computer at work which is a new Mac Pro, with the dual ATI D700's and 6GB of memory each, and experienced the same kind of slowdown, though I think it was maintaining about 5fps instead of the 1-ish on my laptop. I followed that link you posted, and downloaded the free trial of iStat menus. According to that software, I don't go above about a third of my graphics memory on the laptop. I'm attaching a screenshot. Any other suggestions? I could totally live with extended render times from Magic, if I was able to continue to use my computer for other things, but this Magic module slows down the entire system (other apps, menus, etc). A lot of the GLSLShaders slow the system down a little, even with antialiasing off, but so far, the antialiasing module is the only one that has created such a slow down.

-Tim

[Sadler]

For your reference, quaternion+AAx2 on Win7 and GTX970 gives me 15 fps but even quaternion on its own is close to maxing out the GPU. Without AA I get 48 fps.

[blackdot]

So it's this quaternion thingy thats very resource intensive? I mean the 970 should be up to this. I could verify this on my 980 but i doubt it'll be much faster than on the 970.

\\edit: did a test anyway. win7 64bit, gtx980 here. with the quaternion.txt the fps are between 43 and 60. it drops periodically to 43. with 2x AA the range is between 18 and about 50 fps. everything at 1280x720.

seems to me this is a very intensive shader that's better not used

[Magic]

Aah, yes, thanks for posting that screenshot Tim. I agree with Sadler -- the problem isn't really with the Antialias module at all. It's the quaternion shader itself. Quaternions are notoriously compute-intensive, and they will go slow even on the fastest machines (when rendered in real-time). And using the Antialias module just makes it that much worse, because it renders internally at 2x the resolution, which is actually 4x the pixels.

Would you be able to get by using a different shader? That would probably be the best solution for now.