When I DO put them to use, the increase in cpu usage is a little or a
lot depending on what they’re doing, like I would expect.

I am wondering if there is a way to efficiently manage large amounts of slab
fx without draining the cpu. Maybe someone can give a little insight on how
slab is handled by Jitter? Is it normal to get cpu utilization from inactive
slab objects? If so, is it possible to dynamically load sfx files without
getting hick ups? Thanks.

T_

> I was just testing a setup with different layers of video each
> processed by a series of slab objects. The slab routing is switched
> in realtime, so they have to be “stand-by”. I build groups of slab
> with a static shader file name, but noticed that if they don’t do
> anything, they are still eating my cpu. With 8 slabs this is fine,
> but the difference between 8 and 24 is about 30%. (pentium m 1.86)

I might suggest sending them the message “enable 0″ when not in use.
This might solve your problems.

> If so, is it possible to dynamically load sfx files without getting
> hick ups?

If loading a jxs file gives a hickup (which I believe only happens if
the native driver doesn’t support GLSL, and instead uses the Cg
Runtime for compiling the shader), the hickup should only happen the
first time, as we cache the compiled shader code for all subsequent
uses.

Another thing which sometimes leads to file related hickups has
nothing to do with loading/compiling the shader, but rather searching
through a large search path for the named file. You might want to use
absolute path rather than just the filename. There should be some
threads in the archives covering this topic.

Hope this helps.

-Joshua

T_