I wanted to share what I’ve learned and progress we’ve made and get input from anyone else using Intuiface to power large video walls.
These tests were run on an Alienware Area 51 with 2 Gforce GTX 980 Ti cards.
Intuiface seems to be crippled when using display arrays powered by more than 1 video card. Video files and any image or object with position animation seemed to choke down to about 10 frames per second or less. (stutter effect)
After buying the display port adapters we needed to test using 1 video card instead of 2, the performance of 3 1080p videos running at the same time became acceptable and not stuttered. (scattered accross three 4K displays, all running in 1 player)… So this was nice progress… Here is a video of that test after adding 3 more videos. The video starts to stutter a little but with all thats going on (6 videos timelines sending actions to syncronize background images, text callouts and an image collection, it’s pretty impressive. - note this looks like a pile of crap because it’s not a real project- just a test I threw together.
*edit - how can I share links to videos in dropbox. The player its automatically adding here isn’t working (in Chrome on mac at least).
**edit - I commented out the link so copy and paste them (without the ///)
The test in this next video is a 6K video (scaled up to 12K in intuiface) playing accross three 4K displays. The question is, since Intuiface uses VLC’s playback engine (or a component from it?) why can VLC do this perfectly, but the same exact video in a blank Intuiface project is a problem. Where is the bottleneck and is there anyway to widen it?
Thanks for your feedback. I am personally working on this problem. We found some interesting way of improvement and we need to plan how to integrate them properly.
Your blank project compared with VLC was our main test.
We will integrate theses changes/fixes in a future release.
Wonderful to hear! We feel like Intuiface is the best tool the type of video walls we develop. Just need to work out some kinks like this and it will be our go-to solution.
Is IntuiFace able to support a 4 x 4 HD video wall? If so, any idea on what hardware would be needed? If not, what is the maximum reasonable video wall size before there is an unacceptable performance decrease?
for the moment we are working on enhancing the perfs of video rendering; we are confident to be able to have similar performance than VLC, at least with one unique graphic card; this may means 4 or 6 fullHD screens (maybe more than fullHD, depending on the graphic card). We have made serious progress in this way, but they are still some glitches to solve. As soon as will have a beta version of the player we will keep you informed. I hope to have some preliminary version early January.
For multiple graphic cards, we currently just do not know… It will certainly be a next step.
This probably has come up in your testing but just in case it could help…
Today, I was creating a background animation of moderated instagram photos from a dynamic folder. Slowly moving this 15,000 pixel wide collection of images across ALL three 4K screens. This destroyed performance (it runs perfectly on 1 monitor before you hit F11 to fill all screens)… Then I deleted the keyframes of these collections so there was no more position animation… still same performance hit… But then I deleted the asset collection and all the other stuff in the front layer (videos etc) plays great. So I think having an asset that spans across display ports is a culprit.
Your observation is interesting. I made some similar one with the internal enhanced 64bits players with better video perfos. For example in this preliminary version, videos perfo are degraded if a text input asset is included (not even displayed) in the same scene… A bit weird.
So I am interested in your scenario. Can you provide us (here or on the support site http://support.intuilab.com) either the full XP (I do not need the video, i can use our owns), or just the ifx file. This can help us finding new perfo impacting scenarios / cases.
Yesterday we created a flash background with some moving shapes, The flash animation is 5760x3240 which is half of the actual project size and this performed quiet badly if you don’t know already flash only allows you to create a stage up to the resolution above.
Whilst having the flash background playing with a few images and videos you could instantly tell that Intuiface was struggling to render the project. So i then proceed in testing further only this time we have videos and PDF’s and a 4K video playing with the flash file and it seems that the flash file was killing the players performance dramatically. But i now conclude that having a flash in your project is a performance killer. - Testing before putting the project on a 18 screen videowall with a res of 11520x3240. We did all the performance tweaks such as putting everything in a excel sheet etc etc. But for something like this to work on a video wall doesn’t seem with flash, the only alternative for me is to create a video version a moving background and see how that works.
But i will keep you guys updated on how the performance is on the actual unit around next week.
They are chances that we won’t be able to enhance the flash asset performances in 6.0.0. However, I would be interested if you can share this large animation with the support. I don’t remember ever see such a large one… So it would be a good entry point for some test assessment on our side.
Today we got the “Boxx” brand computer setup that will be running this clients 12K video wall and I tried the same test files I mentioned above using the 5.7 player and the video runs MUCH smoother, even the full screen test now runs almost as well as VLC player… (the split-screen comparison video I posted at the top of this thread was very chunky.)
The main difference in the 2 tests is today I ran a Quadro M4000 video card, where as the other was a Gforce GTX 980 Ti… Which is weird because my tech guy is telling me the 980 is rated higher… Or maybe it was something that was fixed in an player update between Dec 22 and now. Anyway, now to try out this 6 beta
nice to see that a Boxx with a quadro M4000 offers good performances for your wall!
The reason why the M4000 behave better than a GTX980 might be the memory of the GPU.
On our side we did a lot of work based on the XP you shared with the support. And we finally find out a perf issue related to the use in this large display of both videos and visual effects applied to a 4 asset grids. This is due to large GPU memory needed for these effects in the underlying technology of intuiface.
We already knew that visual effect can kill the perf on low-mid end PC (we talked about blur effect in the our KB article http://support.intuilab.com/kb/how-to/optimize-performance). We discovered with your XP that the blur/hue rotation… effects also kill the performances on high end PC, with high end GPU (a GTX1070 in our case) with multiple displays.
So in your case, if you get rid of these graphic effects, you should be able to achieve very good performances.
