[PD] How do I squeeze more performance out of Gem?

[John Harrison]

I'm working with a high-powered machine but I'm running into a bottleneck
with Gem. I'm running at 20fps and at times was intending to have as many as
200+ lines and spheres on a 1024x768 screen. At around 60 lines/spheres I'm
already at 50% CPU. I know the problem is Gem because if I stop rendering,
CPU immediately drops to less than 4%. There's some other manipulations I
use periodically too causing another 40%+ of CPU so I'm a far cry from my
200+ intention while saturating my computational limits. If I turn lighting
off, BTW, I already gain 10% CPU back (not an option I want to explore.)

I'm not sure what to do and was even considering breaking the rendering into
independent screens (this machine has 8 cores), then using pix_share to
recombine them in a "master" instance. I'd have to use pix_snap to capture
each of the Gem windows in each of the processes, and each one draws about
40% CPU when capturing a 1024x768 buffer at 20 fps so besides creating a
headache for myself this is going to be a lot of CPU overhead. I also don't
know how the graphics card is fitting into all of this, if it would become a
bottleneck at some point, how to tell, etc. What's the "top" command for a
graphics card? :-)

These lines and spheres are nothing special, btw. No texturing, just
translates, colors, and alpha. the lines are made with curves of 2 points
each.

Is there some trick or some area of programming or using the graphics card I
need to be considering? Any thoughts/advice would be appreciated. It's
strange --- I don't think I'm seeing performance on this machine much better
than on my not-so-special laptop.

This machine has Nvidia GeForce GTX 460, Ubuntu 10.10 32 bit, Pd-extended
0.42-5 binary from the Pure Data site, Intel i7 3Ghz. I'm using Nvidia
proprietary driver 290.19.06.

When I say stuff like "40% CPU" I mean for a single core. So in theory this
machine has 800% CPU limit in my nomenclature. But since an instance of
Pd/Gem runs on only a single core, I have a limit of 100% for any single
Pd/Gem instance (as most of you already know I'm sure.)

-John

P.S. I'm loving working with Gem and pmpd these days. Awesome stuff, guys!
:-)
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