Magic Music Visuals

Ok. Last two questions I have posted I have gotten workable solutions so hopefully someone can help out here.

I am having major frame rate issues with Magic. I am consistently under 10 fps. I have a newer Mac Book Pro with 16 GB or Ram. Grahics card is a AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2048 MB Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB. I have about 20 scenes in my playlist for a performance tomorrow night. Nothing else is running on the mac and I reboot right before loading magic. One thing to note is the Show Free Graphic Memory is grayed out and not sure why. I can look at activity monitor and see that Magic is crushing my CPU.

My question is what steps can I take to improve performance? I am thinking perhaps there is a scene or two that it is really taxing the system but I'm not sure how to figure this out without deleting a bunch of scenes which I don't really have time to do before tomorrow night.

Thanks in advance for any help.

According to VCBM.net the discrete and on-board are not that far apart (1486 vs 1941) and not really all that great. The fact that your GPU memory is greyed out tells me your probably using the on-board. The Radeon may have better GL drivers and is about 30% more powerful than the Iris so based just on the maths you'd only really get another 4fps maybe more due to better architecture and drivers but not enough for 30fps (the minimum IMO).

I have just bought a new laptop specifically for Magic and Resolume. I knew that I had to configure (Windows) to use the discrete graphics which I did. However, even after changing this performance wasn't great. Reason being, the laptop needs to be plugged in before it would use the discrete graphics.

1. So check your discrete is being used.
2. See if power or power options are the issue.
3. Think about simplifying your comp to match your GPU.

If you select Help > OpenGL Info in Magic, it will tell you which GPU is being used. Your discrete GPU should be used automatically unless there is some other system setting that's overriding it.

Your most likely issue is that even top-of-the-line MacBook Pros have underpowered discrete GPUs. This is especially true when running at Retina resolutions. Try lowering your overall desktop resolution or at least your Magic project's resolution.

There are some other tips here: https://magicmusicvisuals.com/downloads ... erformance. As Sadler mentioned, power issues can sometimes be a factor.

Overall though, the easiest way to improve your FPS is to simplify your scenes. Keep in mind that Magic doesn't restrict the complexity of your scenes, so it's up to you to monitor when things start slowing down. At that point, and with all other things being equal, your only option is to stop adding modules.

Show Free Graphic Memory is grayed out and not sure why

Not all computers support this, especially on Mac. If you select Help > OpenGL Info, it needs to have the GL_ATI_meminfo extension on AMD cards, or GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info on NVidia.

I'm not sure how to figure this out without deleting a bunch of scenes which I don't really have time to do before tomorrow night.

You don't have to delete anything . I'd suggest disabling (bypassing or powering off) all the modules in one of your slow scenes, and then enable them one by one until you find out what's really affecting your FPS. https://magicmusicvisuals.com/downloads ... ingModules

Ok, I have actually figured out the issue here is black syphon. I was using this to import a live video feed from the gopro camera I use for live video input. I noticed that I was getting serious lag with my video. If I disable the camera and turn off black syphon I get my FPS up to between 45-60 on even my complicated scenes. I have decided to send magic syphon output to MadMapper and then use MadMapper to overlay the video I need. MadMapper recognized the camera without using black syphon and it does not drop my frame rate at all and there is no lag on the video capture. I lose the ability to tweak the video but that is not a huge deal and the two programs are playing nice with each other.

Thanks for the suggestions. Glad I was able to get this working since replacing my laptop is not really an option here.