Testing Cobra engine on Windows

Hi,

I completed tests located on GitHub with the first build of Synfig with Cobra engine for Windows. It was a bit tricky, I had to port two sh scripts to bat, but that wasn’t too hard.
You can download results here: onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=D … file%2czip

Scripts were ‘quickly ported’, that means I didn’t pay much attention to it, so there can be bugs. E.g. you have to place the whole ‘rendering’ folder to the root of Synfig folder in order for scripts to work properly. And I am not sure if spaces are handled correctly, so better install Synfig-Cobra to the path without spaces.

During the test, I saw many messages that text files are different, when script compares ‘optimized_task_list.log’ and ‘task_list.log’ files, but it’s because CRLF/LF difference between UNIX-like and Windows platforms, so not an error. ‘result.tga’ files was mostly equal and always contain a properly rendered images.

All tests were running on my home PC:
OS: Windows 10 Pro, 64 bits
Processor: Intel Core i5 CPU 650 (3.20 GHz)
RAM: 4GB
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 240
Scripts.zip (1.24 KB)

Hi!
Wow! You did the whole kadoodle! Nice work. I limited myself to some basic workflow tests while working on vector characters and the testruns looked very promising and everything went very fluent and smooth. In multithread even faster. The future looks bright :smiley:
Greetz!

Thanks, man! Not sure what ‘kadoodle’ means, but I guess it’s something good, right? :slight_smile:

I really hope so. I use a lot of raster graphics in my animations and a lot of distortions/gradients/warp layers for different effects. After the work grows complex, Synfig begins to eat up a lot of time rendering it. Zooming out the scene (a lot) and checking ‘Low quality’ is the only things that helps me for now.

Hello Svarov!

Whoa, you did a really complex work! We use those scripts for internal debugging. Generally I expect to get some simple speed measurements, comparing Legacy and Cobra engines (the time values are displayed in the statusbar). Something like provided by Dirk Baeten in the comments to this post - plus.google.com/u/0/+Konstantin … ufv98TEAAe

P.S. Apologies for my delayed responses, got sick right before New Year and still recovering. ^__^"

Best Regards,
K.

So… I did the wrong thing, then? sigh I was thinking that tests should be done with scripts because, you know, they’re complicated. Oh well, sorry for misunderstanding.
Now here’s what was expected from me in the first place:

10-rapper:
Legacy:
Zoom to 100: 0,224156
Rotate by 45: 0,258431
Scale (Amount 2): 0,222963
Zoom in (x8): 0,285964

Cobra (very slow):
Zoom to 100: 0,153103
Rotate by 45: 0,197093
Scale (Amount 2): 0,447316
Zoom in (x8): 0,909649

Cobra (software):
Zoom to 100: 0,097023
Rotate by 45: 0,114080
Scale (Amount 2): 0,126035
Zoom in (x8): 0,202143

12-rapper-x8:
Legacy:
Zoom to 100: 1,458032
Rotate by 45: 1,449032
Scale (Amount 2): 1,020727
Zoom in (x8): 0,916652

Cobra (very slow):
Zoom to 100: 1,298920
Rotate by 45: 1,148818
Scale (Amount 2): Seems impossible on my PC. Synfig crashes trying to allocate memory (needs more than 4 GB?).
Zoom in (from x2 to x8): Same crash as with 2x scale.
Zoom in (x1): 1,683157

Cobra (software):
Zoom to 100: 0,610389
Rotate by 45: 0,622391
Scale (Amount 2): 0,479297
Zoom in (x8): 0,876625

14-images:
Legacy:
Zoom to 100: 0,043031
Rotate by 45: 0,045006
Scale (Amount 2): 0,053037
Zoom in (x8): 0,189134

Cobra (very slow):
Zoom to 100: 0,021013
Rotate by 45: 0,057038
Scale (Amount 2): 0,014973
Zoom in (x8): 0,173123

Cobra (software):
Zoom to 100: 0,012008
Rotate by 45: 0,011984
Scale (Amount 2): 0,013009
Zoom in (x8): 0,116082

15-images-heavy:
Legacy:
Zoom to 100: 0,160068
Rotate by 45: 0,195138
Scale (Amount 2): 0,231164
Zoom in (x8): 0,581368

Cobra (very slow):
Zoom to 100: 0,080054
Rotate by 45: 0,098070
Scale (Amount 2): 0,070048
Zoom in (x8): 0,320226

Cobra (software):
Zoom to 100: 0,053988
Rotate by 45: 0,070046
Scale (Amount 2): 0,059043
Zoom in (x8): 0,214151

Hello Svarov!
Thank you very much for doing the tests! I’m happy to see we got a speedup for Windows version. :slight_smile: Now I can proceed and build both 32bit and 64bit packages with the support of Blur layer. Stay tuned for our blog!
Best Regards,
K.

Solution for significant reduce memory usage will coming soon.

synfig.org/cms/en/news/fight … ry-issues/

Thanks! There’re lots of improvements lately. Next stable version promises to be great.
But please, don’t get crazy with memory optimization, don’t hurt the actual performance. It’s much easier to buy an additional bank of memory than replace a CPU.

I think it is not only about global impact on hardware, but more about stability of the software and to be able to use more layers and details in the animations.
Especially on 32bit versions ^^