Hello,
After a lot of testing and trying to find a solution for a difficult to solve performance problem (irregular stuttering while framerate is good enough), I finally found a solution that others may be interested in as well.
I have been working on a panda application that involves 210 horizontal field of view surround rendering over 3 displays. Each channel is run by a local version of ppython.exe on a different processor (renamed as ppython_left.exe on processor 2, ppython_center.exe on processor 1 and ppython_right.exe on processor 3). This application involves large and extended databases and runs on a windows 7 professional OS and a GPU with 2 GB minimum. While framerate was always > 30 Hz (typically around 60 Hz), I experienced choppy performance, as if frames were skipped. I accidentally found out that this was caused by a peculiarity of Windows 7 (and maybe Windows 8 as well). I solved it as follows:
- right click the ppython.exe version you are using
- select ‘properties’ from the popup menu
- select the ‘compatibility’ tab
- check the ‘disable desktop composition’ option
- enable and press ok
After that the choppyness is gone and rendering performance is really smooth. Ofcourse there are a number of other reasons for jittery performance, for example, if you the texture memory limit of the GPU (resulting in memory swapping), irregular time intervals etc. But if those things have been fixed, you may want to try this solution as well.