Playing high resolution HAP video

General TouchDesigner Discussion
1

We are encountering frame rate problems in a system that is rendering at 3840x5400, playing video files with some basic compositing. We have a variety of resolutions being used, in some cases tiling several videos into a grid-based layout.
For testing purposes, we created a separate tester .toe which just has 3 Movie File In TOPs playing 3840x5400 video files with a composite and an output window.
The FPS drops are intermittent, with it normally at ~60fps but dipping down to <15fps a few times per minute, for a few seconds each time.

Machine specs:
Win 7 x64
A single NVIDIA Quadro M5000.
A single SSD (trying to find specs for it, but the Device Manager is unusually vague about the model: “manufacturer: (standard hard drive)”)
Intel Core i7-5930K CPU @ 3.50 GHz

Our videos are encoded using HAP, with chunked encoding. We experimented with h264 and went with HAP because the TD wiki suggests it and because h264 has resolution limits.

We have experimented with various tuning parameters in the Movie File In TOPs, but our current settings are:
Pre-Read Frames: 3
Frame read timeout: 1000 (we have also tried 400, 100000, etc)
Use global CPU Cache: True (we have also tried having that turned off)
Async upload to GPU: True (we have also tried having that turned off)
Max decode CPUs: 8 (we have also tried 4)
High Performance Read: True (also tried false)
High Performance Read Factor: 1 (also tried 3)

During the dips, the Performance Monitor has “Waiting for frame” as the largest chunk of time, but in the full player .toe, it also tends to have some time spent in “Uploading a 2D Texture”.

Any recommendations?

2

What’s the bitrate of your files?

Given that you’re reading 3 videos with resolutions over 5k, your bitrate might be a throttling element in this equation. If you can stand to loose a little quality, you might try turning that down slightly and see if your results are any better.

3

Your single SSD is not fast enough.
See also the wiki HAP page:

For instance, a high-end Samsung 850 SSD has a max read spead of ~520 MB/sec, so this would already be too slow.
You should use a PCI-E SSD (they usually have read speads > 2000 MB/sec) or try two SSD’s in raid-0 (which should get your around 1000 MB/sec )

PCI-E M.2 SSD’s have become quite cheap lately and are insanely fast - for instance a Samsung 960 EVO 500GB has a read spead of >3200 MB/S and costs (here in europe) only 215 euros.