PinballX lag following improvement of videos and wheels

[Denys06]

Hello, I just updated my PinballX in the following way:

• Improved all Playfield Videos by upgrading them to 60fps.
• Implemented Animated Wheels in APNG format.

 

The result is that now PinballX lags. When I switch from one table to another, it's not very quick, but the worst part is when I navigate through all the tables, it becomes really slow and everything is delayed.

I want to clarify that the rest of my Pincab works perfectly in 4K, and all the tables run without any problems under Visual Pinball.

 

Could you please provide a solution to help me overcome this slowdown issue in displaying tables in PinballX ?

Thank in advance

[CarnyPriest]

Well, yeah. Videos will be really large and resource intensive. Apng takes system resources too. Videos are just for preview. It's perfectly fine to go with 20 or 30 fps and get the idea what the table looks like. I don't know if you captured yourself or got videos from some other source. An alternative would be to transcode the videos for higher compression (i.e., somewhat lower quality) and achieve smaller file sizes. 

 

Not saying you have to use my script but there is some practical info in the attachment that may help address your issue.

 

 

[Denys06]

Thank you for your response. Indeed, I use 4K videos at 60FPS with average compression.

 

But I've discovered the root of my problem. I've disabled all my wheels (both normal and animated), and the system works super well without the wheels.

It's the wheels, particularly the APNGs, that slow down my PinballX (but even without them, it's not very fast).

 

How can I overcome this issue? Is there an optimization of my configuration that I can perform so that the wheels don't slow down the scrolling in PinballX?

[CarnyPriest]

Depends on your configuration. 

 

General rule - turn off anything else not pinball-related that is running in the background taking up resources.  

 

Consider any way to reduce the size of your media - if you have configured your screen saver mode to randomly cycle through the wheel every 30 seconds and your media is 60 seconds then that would be an easy decision to cut the media files down to 30 seconds. Try lower frame rate or higher compression or lower resolution - 2K or 1080p. Any one of these or a combination would help performance. I don't know if PinballX has a setting to support GPU or HW acceleration. There may be something there. I don't know if the codec pack that PinballX wants you to install supports H.265. If so, that would give you the option of better performance with the same quality media.

 

Finally, you can try PinballY. It might work better for your system. I like it for mine and I have old hardware for the most part.

 

I never use apng, so I can't comment on it. I just use static png although most files are hi resolution. 

[Denys06]

Thank you.

I am in the process of overclocking my CPU and graphics card and I am in the process of removing all the APNGs and I will probably redo all the videos in lower quality as you advised me.