Green Hippo

April Tip Of The Month -Realtime Hippotizer System Monitoring - Ctrl+f3 Explained

April Tip Of The Month -Realtime Hippotizer System Monitoring - Ctrl+f3 Explained

Some of you may not be aware that Hippotizer has a real-time system monitoring feature. Pressing Ctrl+F3 will overlay this information in the top left hand corner of the main output screen and will provide information on the Hippotizer.

Some of you (me included) may have looked at this information and been unsure of what each counter represents or the possible implications of certain values. Hopefully this article will give a better understanding of these readings.

 FPS: Frames Per second. This should be between 60 and 40 as a rule of thumb. Below 40 you may see poor video playback. You will notice this value decreases when the strain on the system increases.

 DT:  I-----------X------------I------------I

DT stands for Delta Time and shows the time the engine takes between frames to render. Optimal is 16ms which results in full 60fps refresh. Depending on your project and application the X travelling to the right indicates an increase in time between 2 frames. Typically going up to the next vertical line is ok. Beyond that frames will be dropped and this can be quite noticeable.

SYSMEM: Not used anymore. This did monitor the amount of memory traveling through the system in previous versions and can be ignored

VIDMEM: Total Video Memory being used. Not 100% accurate due to GFX card memory being very hard to monitor. This reading is a sum of all system sub components listed below it. These are:-

• - Hyper FX :  Monitors video memory being used by effects
• - Vlab Resources:  This measures the Memory being used by the input cards.
• - VM Allocation Temp: Temporary video memory allocation. Managed how much total video memory is being used.
• - MediaPlayer: monitor how much video memory is being used per layer. This is sorted by largest to smallest video memory not by layers 1-8.
• - Flex3D Resources: Flex 3D is utilized when using 3D Effects. This monitors the amount of memory allocated and used by 3D Effects.
• - PicLoader Resources: Monitors amount of memory being used by static images.
• - Others: Anything else that isn’t Layer / FX using video memory.

• - Back Buffer: All rendering is sent to the back buffer to be stored for collaboration with effects, geometry, MediaPlayer. Shows the largest amount of memory used on layers or by the output.

- RT: Run Time. How long the engine has been running in seconds.

- D. Out: Amount of data transferred between board and CPU.

There are no hard and fast rules with any of these values. In fact you may find many of them only useful either when comparing two or more systems’ performances or when working in conjunction with tech support. However, if you frequently monitor them, it is a quick way to perform a Hippotizer health check or identify when you might be overloading the server or have performance issues with media.

Thanks to Tom for this months tip ;)