Revision as of 01:21, 8 April 2008

Description

Coverflow... This plugin is still in beta developement and should not be used if you are affraid of bugs or crashes!

Settings

Performance Tab

To understand the effect of the settings in the performance tab it is important to know the basic architecture of the plugin: The plugin has two threads - one thread to render the image on thread to cache the cover textures.
The image will only be rendered when it is needed - eg. when you restore the foobar window, new textures have been loaded or an animation is shown. While foobar is minimized or completely hidden behind any windows the renderer will do nothing at all and so also cause no load for your cpu.
The texture loading thread loads the covers from you hard-disk into memory so the rederer can display them. This is done in an asynchronous manner (you can see this by scrolling very fast - the covers move faster than the loader can load them -> you see the "hourglass cover"). Once the texture cache is filled, the loader sleeps until you move the covers again. See #Texture Cache for further details.

Rendering Quality

These Settings influence the quality of the generated image. While multisampling only increases the smoothness of the cover edges, supersampling also does increase the cover resizing quality. But while multisampling only increases the load on the GPU, supersampling also increases the load on the CPU. For both of the more passes means more quality, but also increased GPU/CPU+GPU load - supersampling with 2 passes should yield enough quality and settings above 4 should barely make any difference. You should not use 16 pass supersampling, as it is very CPU and GPU intensive (the image is rendered 16 times!).

Changes to the multisampling settings will only take effect after the panel is restarted (either hide and show it or restart foobar)

Texture Cache

Each time you move the display to a new cover, the texture loader makes sure that at least cache size*0.9 covers around the selected cover are loaded.
The covers are loaded into GPU memory, so this also the limiting element for your cache. Remember that there are multiple other applications that use your GPU and all share its memory. So setting the texture cache too large will influence video playback, other multimedia applications as well as games.
The texture loading process works this way: the background loader loads the image into memory and resizes it to the maximum texture size, then the image is moved into GPU memory and compressed. This is called uploading. During the uploading the renderer has to pause, and as the uploading can take rather long (we only have 13ms to render a frame at 60fps) it is only done when there is no animation displayed or when a preloaded image comes into view.

Cache Size: The number of covers that will be cached. This should always be larger than the number of covers displayed at once, because otherwise there will be uploading at nearly every frame what might slow down you rendering severely. But setting this to high might be too much for your GPU memory, thus slowing down you whole system.
Maximum Texture Size: A

@@ Line 17: / Line 17: @@
 === Texture Cache ===
 Each time you move the display to a new cover, the texture loader makes sure that at least ''cache size''*0.9 covers around the selected cover are loaded.<br>
-The covers are loaded into '''GPU memory''',
+The covers are loaded into '''GPU memory''', so this also the limiting element for your cache. Remember that there are multiple other applications that use your GPU and all share its memory. So setting the texture cache too large will influence video playback, other multimedia applications as well as games.<br>
+The texture loading process works this way: the background loader loads the image into memory and resizes it to the ''maximum texture size'', then the image is moved into GPU memory and compressed. This is called uploading. During the uploading the renderer has to pause, and as the uploading can take rather long (we only have 13ms to render a frame at 60fps) it is only done when there is no animation displayed or when a preloaded image comes into view.
+; Cache Size: The number of covers that will be cached. This should always be larger than the number of covers displayed at once, because otherwise there will be uploading at nearly every frame what might slow down you rendering severely. But setting this to high might be too much for your GPU memory, thus slowing down you whole system.
+; Maximum Texture Size: A
 === VSync ===
 === Benchmarking ===