Drastic Frame Drop (Max 7)

i can reproduce frame drops when editing a patcher, but not when changing a number box (or other UI object) in a locked patcher.

if you have a patch that reproduces the latter, please post it.

when i change the dimension size the rendering skips frames

Scrolling inside a patcher window also causes the frame rate drop. It is often by half the frames per second.

in the patch you posted, you are triggering a computationally expensive task every time you modify the number box (banging the jit.bfg object), so this slow down is expected, especially as the bfg dim value increases. this is the same in max 6.

however, we were recently made aware of an fps slowdown when patchers are unlocked when running Yosemite.

are you running under Yosemite?

Just to mention Rob ,
That I also get an fps slow when my patcher is unlocked.
I'm on Maverick
Mac os X 10.9.5
processor 2.8Ghz i7
Memory 16g 1600 Mhz DDR3
Nvidia

hope this help give insight that it's not just Yosemite

The fps also drops when the patchers are locked and you begin to scroll the patcher window. It's the case when I have a jit.window on one side of my screen and the patcher on the opposite side and i need to get to an area of my patch that is only reveal through scrolling the fps drop by half.

yes i am currently using Yosemite

however, we were recently made aware of an fps slowdown when patchers are unlocked when running Yosemite.

Thanks God i'm not crazy ! i observed that, and also on Mavericks... it also involved a radical and sudden increase in cpu usage (hm...maybe unrelated ?), when you were actually increasing the size of the patcher canvas - if you reduce the size of the patcher canvas and hence hide some gui elements (even if they are not interactive), the cpu usage would get low drastically.

hi guys. after looking at this issue in detail, i've come to a few conclusions.

1 - running under Yosemite vs Mavericks incurs a slight performance hit for rapidly updating GUI objects. this affects Max 6 and Max 7 the same.

2 - if using jit.world with the default of @displaylink 1, there will be a fps drop when running a patch with rapidly updating GUI objects. (Max 7 only, jit.world doesn't exist in Max 6)

3 - if running on a Retina machine in hi-res mode vs lo-res, there is a significant FPS drop for any GUI activity. so anytime the patch is unlocked, window resized or scrolled, GUI object updated. affects Max 6 and Max 7 the same.

As always, if you want consistent, stable FPS from your Jitter patch, you should minimize GUI activity. if your project requires significant GUI activity (opening windows, updating GUI objects every frame, unlocking the patch during performance(?)), then you have a few options. The best is to separate your GUI patches entirely from your engine patches, and run 2 instances of Max, passing messages using udpsend/receive. a second, much simpler option is to run Max in lo-res mode (get info on the app icon, check the box next to Open in Low Resolution). a third option is to change the Max App preference for Scheduler -> Refresh Rate, to something like 200ms.

last, if using jit.world with lots of GUI activity, try disabling displaylink (@displaylink 0).

hope this helps.

Hi Rob,

Thanks so much for looking into this in more detail. I will give your suggestions a try and get to back to you when I have a chance.