Can someone give me the exact part number for this? I want to make sure I have the right piece with me. i assume it's GUC2015V. I seem to remember some buzz a while back about an updated version.
Bump again -- Seems that I can't manage to make external displays run happy on any of my consoles. . . and 6 months later, still no changes. 3.2.4 still lags immediately when using the external display (RoadHog) -- update guys?
The technical reason the external USB to VGA Monitor solution on Road Hog is causing dmx lag in v3.2.0 and greater is due to a recent move in Hog 3 development from using Qt 3 to using Qt 4. For those of you wondering, QT is the application framework we use that is largely responsible for the makeup of the Hog 3 graphical user interface.
In Qt 3 painting our user interface (windows, spreadsheets, etc) on the screen was done by sending commands down to Windows which allowed the driver and the hardware to accelerate certain things such as region fills etc. This is very important for a display connected via USB which is significantly slower than PCI. For example, when dragging a window around the screen Qt can send short commands to Windows to manipulate the video memory. These commands are forwarded over the USB link and onto the hardware which then manipulates it's video memory directly. Since these are short commands the output is updated quickly even when there are many commands being sent over a relatively slow USB link.
However, in Qt 4 painting changed significantly on some platforms, including Windows. In order to provide a consistent set of features across all platforms Qt can no longer use the Windows interface to perform drawing tasks. The Windows drawing interface has not grown to keep pace with Qt's capabilities, so Qt uses a software engine instead which draws into a buffer in main memory without GPU acceleration then sends that entire buffer to Windows to be shown on the screen. This normally works well since the CPU, main memory and the PCI bus are very fast. In the case of the USB to VGA adapter this means transferring each frame across USB, which is much slower.
Since this uses a fair amount of CPU, the DP8K process is starved and DMX output suffers. From recent testing we can see that this mostly a problem with windows like the effects window.
Unfortunately the move to QT 4 was a necessary move in the continued development of the Hog 3 family of products. We have tried moving process priorities around so that instead of the DMX output suffering instead only the onscreen drawing of the desktop windows would be sluggish but this kind of prioritizing only led to greater and more severe problems in our testing.
Thanks for the reason. Now the bigger question, what can be done to address it? I mean, the video issue isn't just on the Road Hog ... You know the issues we are having on our Hog III too.
