Messages

16

Feature requests / Re: query the system's current FPS setting

« on: April 26, 2017, 08:42:02 am »

I beg to differ: It would be a good starting point.

Have you read what I said about the GPU driver?

I did read that. Be assured, I'm glad that you take the time to give good advice and I carefully read everything you write. Let me explain in more detail what my problem is:
On my system (Kubuntu 16.10 running on an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4570, no graphics card) I have lots of problems with stuttering. The only way I have found so far to get the system displaying my graphics smoothly is by using setVerticalSyncEnabled(true) and making sure I call display() in time. With the method I have outlined above, I need an estimate of the time budget I have to come up with new frames so I can adapt my processing time if my calculations take too long. I would like to base my estimate on the currently active FPS setting, which, as you say, is easy to extract but not available in the public API. All I'd like to see is a way to query this setting, never mid the driver. What the driver does or does not do to the stream of frames is outside my control anyway, but it can be tweaked by the user to look good on their hardware.
I have timed the time difference from one call to display() to the next and found that, at least on my system, the times do eventually settle on an average which is close to the figure I search, but extracting it this way means looking at the frame-to-frame times over some time, waiting for them to stabilize and then extract an estimate. It would be much easier to have a value to start out with, namely the 20ms for 50fps or 16.7 ms for 60fps etc..
Maybe it's not a good idea to put the value inside the sf::VideoMode structure, but a simple getter function à la sf::getCurrentFPSSetting() would not harm anyone, especially if it says in the documentation that there is no garantee that the system will actually display frames at this rate and that it is merely the setting in the window manager.

17

Feature requests / Re: query the system's current FPS setting

« on: April 25, 2017, 12:02:42 pm »

The refresh rate of monitor could easily be added to sf::VideoMode; I think all back-ends already have this information, it's just a matter of exposing it in the public API.

Plase do!

But I don't think it is relevant.

I beg to differ: It would be a good starting point. Currently I am using some default which seems sensible, assuming 50fps. If I had information from the system, I could use that as the starting point and with a bit of luck this starting point is better than guessing a 'plausible' value.

18

Feature requests / Re: query the system's current FPS setting

« on: April 25, 2017, 11:47:05 am »

The refresh rate of monitor(s) is not hard to extract

This is precisely what I want. I'm not sure if one can query the refresh rate of the monitor itself, but I'd like to get the rate at which the system is sending frames out to it. If you know of a portable way of extracting the refresh rate of monitor, please let me know!

One solution is to measure the duration between two consecutive (empty) frames when the application starts.

I'd like to avoid trickery like this - and if the information is easy to get, why choose a complicated way of getting it 

... but without knowing exactly what you do, it's hard to say more.

I'm writing an image viewer allowing all kinds of manipulations like zoom, pan and rotate, and I animate these manipulations smoothly, relying of a fixed frame rate, and the vsync to display every frame in time. I can adapt rendering times by rendering to a smaller frame, which I let SFML display enlarged by using a view. This way, may (CPU-based) rendering time can be adapted to what the system can handle, while the upsacling of the small frame which I've rendered is done via SFML/openGL and takes next to no time. When at rest after animating the zoom, pan, etc, I render to full resolution again.

To keep this process running smoothly, I render in a separate thread and buffer a few frames. This way, even if the rendering times vary from frame to frame I don't get stutter because with a few frames buffered it all averages out. Works like a dream, and the latency is so small it doesn't matter - after all, I'm writing an image viewer, not a shooter.

19

Feature requests / query the system's current FPS setting

« on: April 25, 2017, 10:43:59 am »

Hi group!

I'm looking for a portable way to query the FPS (frames per second) setting of the system my SFML program is running on. So I am *not* looking for a way to measure how many FPS my program is producing, but I want the currently active setting for the display driver. My program is driven by the vertical sync and can adapt it's computational load to produce frames faster or slower, but to get an idea how much time it has to produce a frame, it should know what the system is expecting: If the graphics unit feeds 60 FPS to the monitor, my time budget to render a frame is obviously smaller than it is when it's using 50 or even 30 FPS if I want to supply it with frames at the currently set rate.

While there may be ways to get the information via the system settings, I'd like to do a query from *inside* my program which will work on all systems SFML supports, so that it's portable. I suspect the information should not be too hard to extract - ideally I'd like it to be incorporated, for example, into the sf::VideoMode structure, or to be returned by a simple getter function.