Flex 6300 problem jumping panadapter and stuttering waterfall

Tim - W4TME

This would mostly eliminate network infrastructure. I now suspect this may be a PC issue.  Do you have a different PC you can try other than the laptop?

GI4FZD

Should 2 open panadapters be using over 50% CPU on an 2.3ghz I5 processor,
Things improve with only one panadapter.
I will try on I7 again this evening, Thanks for all the help, Apoligies to those who were upset by the videolinks. Again the laptop is capable ,apart from my previous 6300 it was also running Anan 100D with cusdr and 6 windows open quite happily.
I will look for older video driver in case thats a problem

GI4FZD

I Think i have narrowed this down to a graphics card driver problem, will do some more tests this evening.
Once again thanks for help
cheers
Paul

Tim - W4TME

RRR,  Let us know the outcome.

[Deleted User]

I have been noticing it too on my computer in the last few days. It generally goes away after 3 or 4 seconds

Tim - W4TME

There is a known and acknowledged issue with 1.3.8 with a delay in the panadapter and metering that we are working on for release v1.4.  This defect is not affecting Paul since he reverted back to a previous version of SmartSDR and it did not resolve his issue.

Steve W6SDM

Yes, that's what I meant.  It looks like we're way beyond that in troubleshooting.  The only good thing about these evasive little gremlins is that it feels so good when you squash them. 

Anthony Bowyer

Not sure if you've resolved this yet or not, but it strikes me that your video looks very much like mine if the power-off-monitor timeout has been reached and they go off. Bringing them out, the display 'catches up' with gaps very similar to what you are seeing.

Since laptops are generally defaulted to a mode that will conserve active time on battery power (with bleed over to the 'on ac power' state), I wonder if one or more of these settings is interfering. One in particular I've seen issues with is 'auto adjust for screen brightness'. Basically the backlight intensity is adjusted as the amount of ambient light changes. Could be other similar power saving options for video as well.

Thot I'd mention it..

GI4FZD

Problem seems to be resolved by loading earlier AMD(ATI) graphics card drivers.

Anthony Bowyer

Makes you wonder what the difference is. I had a similar experience with a tablet. Finally found that the newer driver had change some of the defaults for power settings and such. Hard to say what ATI did with the later driver. Or, if it is a MS supplied update, it could be a lot of things. Glad you got it working correctly!

Tim - W4TME

Paul - what version number of the NVIDIA driver is working?  I'd like to keep that information for our support team.

GI4FZD

Laptop uses Radeon 6600M/6700M series
driver is AMD 13.251.9001.1001 dated 04.07/2014
Cheers
Paul

Tim - W4TME

Got it.  Thanks!

Nigel

Just an FYI I tried a NVida Geforce 6800 and had terrible waterfall stuttering.

I went back to a ATI radion HD 4550 and stuttering gone.

Tim - W4TME

The GeForce 6800 has a video passmark of 109 (that is not a typo)  A GPU with a passmark of 1000 is recommended for SmartSDR running 8 pans with 8 slices.

EA4GLI

Dear OMs,

I recently purchased a Flex 6300 and was at first disappointed with the performance of the waterfall display and panadapter. I had to lower the speed and FPS way down to avoid the lines the OP was referring to.

I was very surprise by this because my laptop is an Intel Core i7 with 8GB of RAM and a dedicated 2GB Nvidia GT550M video card. 

I am running 2 24" LCD monitors off the laptop, one on the VGA port and one on the HDMI port.

After some research online I discovered the culprit of my performance issues.

By default, desktop applications use the integrated graphic card, in the case of this laptop, an Intel HD 3000. While this card is perfectly capable of running a couple of monitors and display 2D content, it does struggle with games and GPU intensive apps such as SmartSDR.
It is only when you run a computer game, that the default setting on the Nvidia card will kick in, utilizing the more powerful Nvidia card to run the graphics.

All of this time I was running SmartSDR on the integrated Intel HD 3000 card instead of taking advantage of the better video card.

The following are the steps to change it if you happen to have a similar configuration to mine, with an NVIDIA video card.

First go to NVIDIA Control Panel. You can easily do this on Win7 by right clicking an empty area of the desktop and selecting "NVIDIA Control Panel" on the context menu.

On the top menu options "File | Edit | Desktop | 3D Settings | Help" click on "Desktop". Once there, select "Display GPU Activity Icon in Notification Area". This will add a little square icon on the bottom right of your task bar. If it doesn't have any color, you are not running any program through the NVIDIA GPU engine. You can also hover the icon and it will tell you the number of programs running on the video card.



Next, we need to make sure SmartSDR uses the better video card.

Inside the NVIDIA Control Panel you can see a list of Tasks on the left column. Open the 3D Settings group and select "Manage 3D settings".



Inside the "Global Settings" tab you can select the option to Always run the "High-performance NVIDIA processor" instead of the default "Auto-select".



You can also select the "Program Settings" tab and individually add the programs that will use the NVIDIA card versus using the integrated intel HD GPU.

You can add "smartsdr" and that will make a world of difference! It did on my laptop.



I hope this helps!

My waterfall and panadapter are buttery smooth now.

Steve W6SDM

Great writeup, Salvador.   I don't use an Nvidia card because three of my five monitors work off of USB adapters and the other two are the VGA and DVI connectors on my on board graphics card.  For those that do use add-on graphics card, your writeup will be a big help.  Thanks for taking the time.