This is a fix for ati slowdown. This time on menu redraw, by ton. And It works! Test for your card to see the difference.
Hi,
I went over the UI code, and removed all frontbuffer drawing from it.
Instead there's a system that only copys pixels from the back to
frontbuffer and back.
The only frontbuffer drawing now is with glCopyPixels(), which *really*
should work on most systems. I hope.
Since I suspect that especially drawing commands (lines, polys, text)
was causing the slowdown, this could be method how to have speedy UI
again for many ATI cards.
Attached you can find a patch. Apply it in blender/source/blender/
PLease note that only the pulldown menus have coded with new system.
The normal buttons don't refresh now on mouse-over or click.
-Ton-
(BTW apart from speed & clean code, this method also will allow usage
of transparant 'overlay' messages or menus). Or using antialiased
drawing.)
(BTW2 it should be tested on sgi/sun workstations too, since they have
different swapbuffer method... is that possible?)
Hi Tom,
Great to hear this works.
I now have the full UI code adapted. Works very clean and cpu
insensitive. The patch is attached, again apply this on source/blender/
Frontbuffer drawing in UI now still happens on more locations, like
what you mention, but also the preview render in shading buttons do
this. That's a separate issue to tackle.
Thanks,
-Ton-
p.s. This is only an exe file. copy it in your blender dir. To make sure the original is not erased, the file's name is blenderati.exe
a new build is available
Last edited by gabio on Thu Oct 07, 2004 12:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
When I render in fullscreen mode and schitch back from the rendered image to blender, all menus are not selectable anymore:(
I have to switch to windowed-mode to get rid of it. If I use only the window-mode everything works fine. This also occured with the previous release.
It's better with this version! But I still have some display problems with an ATI7500 on winXPSP1:
- When starting Blender in full screen mode, all seems fine. If going to window mode afterward it still works ok, and if going back to fullscreen, still ok.
- Now, when starting Blender in window mode (using Ctrl-U to save the settings), all seems fine, but then if I toggle to fullscreen mode, I get ATI graphical problems with menus, etc.
And if I toggle back to window mode, the menus then don't display at all!
Using an Ati 9700pro on Win2K and new stable drivers. Blender is unusable in fullscreen mode, most hotkeys don't work lots of trouble with displaying menus because no menu appears. When switching back in windows mode enything is fine.
Ok - menus are good; although it seems a little 'twitchy'... In addition to the comment above about the text being slow at the top-right when rendering, I'd like to add the text when doing a border-select... (B then drag a rectangle out). Actually, the B-select has a nasty lag when just moving the cursor around - the slow text is only present when dragging out the selection box...
This is only after checking it for a couple of minutes - so no in-depth test so far.
I'm using WinXP, SP1 with a Radeon VE (7000 chipset) dual headed.
First of all, this is excellent. The speed-up is a great relief.
In terms of reporting back information, I have this:
> All of the text-drawing issues are resolved except for the file navigation and the render progress bar. I haven't tested everything, though. The render progress bar definitely slows down the render process, adding as much as 15-20 seconds to each render (multiplied by whatever the OSA settings are), so its a prominent drag on program speed. I personally see no need in being repeatedly told the same information on each frame rendered anyway, and since the console reports frame render times and the mouse cursor reports the current frame number, I don't know if this bar is even necessary. Is there a way, by any chance, to turn it off?
> Blender locked up after about 45 minutes of use, during a render. It was not the first render, so I know this particular build is capable of rendering.
Otherwise, it was great to be using Blender with functional menus. Thanks for that!
