Expected frame rates for a full-screen blur

[Mike Hearn]

Actually, playing some more, it seems like the poor frame rates I'm seeing
are not blur related, but rather affect any animation (i.e. all rendering)
when my main window is maximized. Shrinking the window so it's smaller
results in smooth animations of any kind. This seems to be true no matter
how I try and simplify my scene (e.g. turning off a tiled background image).

I grabbed Ensemble and tried the circle blur demo. It actually made my
entire laptop unusable. The entire OS crawled to a halt and fps was maybe
0.3 for everything, not just the Java app. Going back to the main menu made
things snappy again.

This is a bit disconcerting. Does anyone else see such appalling
performance impact from the blurred circles demo on their Mac? Is this a
driver issue, perhaps? Are there any platforms where this demo hits a good
fps?



On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 6:10 PM, Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net> wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> On a MacBook Pro with OS X 10.9.2, does anyone have any estimates for
> anticipated frame rates of a full-screen animated blur? I noticed that when
> my window is not maximized, the blur is smooth and high frame-rate. When
> maximized the blur is somewhat choppy. Unfortunately I have no clue how
> much work is really involved in GPU blurring and whether I'm being
> unreasonable to expect that many pixels to be blurred per second (this is
> on a retina display).
>
> Can anyone let me know if it's worth me trying to optimise this or whether
> hardware limitations will mean that realistically I am expecting too much.
>
> thanks!
>