FPS issues and Dual Boot experiments

[Fractal Grinder]

Hey so recently I have talked with Eric about seeing if Windows 7 has any signifigant performance boost when compared with Windows 10, so I have installed a copy of Windows 7 on a new partition on my PC, pretty much solely for Magic and Resolume(now that Im using that to projection map).

This is where things start confusing the hell outta me.

So I did this all to check my "Free Graphics Memory" and Frame Rate comparision from 10 to 7. I started running some of the scenes I need to work for my first live gig, the FPS was accurate to my eyes at least, and things seemed to be running REALLY smoothly for my first couple of tests. I started to write down the numbers for my free graphics memory and FPS, in Windows 7, some of my bigger or more CPU intensive scenes ran at 60fps with numbers like 128,336 for my free memory.

Then I did something like shut down Magic and reopened it because something was off or idk I dont remember, but upon opening it again to continue my tests, having changed abolutely NOTHING from before, I am now consistantly getting numbers like 41,292, in the same scenes, I still get 60fps on most of these scenes but the memory read out is completely different, which makes me thing that this is a inaccurate way to do my tests becuase thats quite the differance from changing nothing.

Also some of these scenes in this project act very weird. Like one of them is stuck at 30fps now until I clean graphics memory, but when I clean graphics memory, another scene that was 60fps, drops down to 30fps, and the one that was lagging before, performs fine. Its really confusing me and I dont know if I should even continue these tests.

Any help or insight is appreciated

[Magic]

One critical thing to remember is that graphics memory is used throughout the entire operating system, not just in Magic. The amount of free memory Magic reports is not just for Magic but for any other applications that use the GPU -- web browsers, video players, image editors, etc. That's why I highly recommend you run as few other applications as possible.

Resolume in particular uses the GPU heavily, and obviously I don't know exactly what's going on underneath its hood, but it could be doing different things at different times, thus giving you different memory readings. Magic can't do projection mapping (yet), so you do have to use something like Resolume, but I would try to close every other program you don't need.

The reason I usually recommend Windows 7 instead of 8 or 10 is that 8 and 10 use the GPU more in the core operating system functions, thus less is available to Magic or any other GPU-intensive application. But even Windows 7 does use the GPU if you have an "Aero" theme enabled, and the amount of graphics memory it uses can change from one moment to the next.

Also, even if you have 1GB of graphics memory, having only 128 MB free at a given time means you're using more than 850 MB for Magic (and Resolume and anything else). Which is a lot, especially if you're only loading your scenes one at a time (in v1.65). 850 MB in one scene would be a truly massive scene, and I could certainly understand some slowdown from 60 to 30 fps.

I have an NVidia GTX 970M (3GB) on my Windows 7 laptop, and even when I load the ManyScenes.magic sample project at 1920x1080, it only uses around 800 MB total when I load *all* the scenes together at the same time. So I still have more than 2GB free.

Adding tons of modules to a scene might help it look better, but there is always a tradeoff. More modules *always* means less speed. I never wanted to enforce a limit of how many modules you can add in a scene because I think it would be arbitrary and ridiculous for me to do so, but you have to be aware that every project and every computer has its limits. Know what I mean?