How to disable the Big Picture background animation?

[Jormangeud]

Big Picture mode is good looking and a good interface, however, it is not usable at the current state. The plain interface eats 70% CPU (this likely causes most of the store videos to be unplayable). Is there a way to disable the eye candy, or suspend the interface when running a game?

Currently, when launching a game, the big picture animation keeps running on the back, eating 20%+ of the CPU. The normal mode keeps using ~4% and games run fine.
I would guess the animation eats GPU cycles as well, as any 3D game becomes unplayably slow.


On some games (e.g. Toki Tori, Little Racers Street, Guacamelee!, PixelJunk Shooter/Monsters Ultimate) the game is launched on the background and the Big Picture animation keeps running on the top. Shortcut key to switch windows works to get to the game. It seems this happens almost with any game I've run, Superfrog HD seems to launch on top (PBA still running in the background).


Using linux, nvidia, fluxbox.


Last, when streaming from a Windows machine, it seems pointless that the Windows machine gets put into the BP and left into the mode after closing the game.

[Jormangeud]

I tested briefly in the morning, with the Acer and the CPU use seemed to be ~8% for the steam main thread now. I hoped it would fix it, but it had no effect to the frame rate issue.

Now, I ran a new test, and checked the nvidia memory usage (nvidia-smi -q -d MEMORY).

initially:
Driver Version                      : 331.20

Attached GPUs                       : 1
GPU 0000:02:00.0
    Memory Usage
        Total                       : 511 MiB
        Used                        : 77 MiB
        Free                        : 434 MiB

Big Picture:
        Used                        : 177 MiB
        Free                        : 334 MiB

Guacamelee:
        Used                        : 447 MiB
        Free                        : 64 MiB

In game:
        Free                        : 18 MiB

Loaded the game, and to my surprise, it was playable. I would say it was almost as smooth as without the BP.
I thought I'd try it again, dropped to menu from the game, got a slower frame rate. Then back to the game, and it got unplayable again,
Back to Big Picture, nvidia free: 288 MiB.

Closed steam, used 29, free 482.
Steam again, used 61, free 450.
Big Picture, used 277, free 234.

Guacamelee menu, used 380, free 31.
Guacamelee game, 485, 26.
Steam in-game overlay (didn't show up), 493, 18.
Closed in-game overlay, 506, 5.
Back in BP, 339, 172.

I can see X take quite a much CPU (20%) now, when the VRAM is running out. I think I didn't even notice that when steam was the more CPU hungry before. Now steam and guacamelee take both about 10% CPU while in-game (when X uses 20% ).

Launching Guacamelee from desktop interface:
Steam: 79, 432.
Main menu: 340, 171.
Game: 405, 106.
Steam: 81, 430.


I'll try to reproduce the smooth BP event with Guacamelee tomorrow, and check if some of the other games have improved.

[jmccaskey]

Are you running the game fullscreen? If you are running windowed you may be making X/Big Picture hang onto more video memory since the GPU isn't able to assume they are completely in the background especially if you are also running Big Picture windowed (secret -windowed command line!) and it's visible when you are on the desktop and capturing perf stats.

Windows does a good job of virtualizing GPU memory and managing this in recent versions, and it may be that on Linux that's still not happening as well. On SteamOS we have a custom compositor for the overlay and extra logic to optimize this scenario as well, so you would likely see somewhat improved perf vs generic Linux.

The decreased Steam main thread CPU is definitely encouraging and should help you when you are CPU bound. The remaining discrepancies in your couple of tests might come down to how you are testing if you are switching back and forth from desktop to big picture to game in order to take measurements. If your real use case is launch Big Picture, then Launch Guacamelee fullscreen and play and if that is then much faster and Guacamelee is playable then I'd be pretty happy that we'd solved the perf problem for the general common case on Linux here.

[glocetti]

Цитата допису jmccaskey:

GeForce 210 is also very low end as a GPU, even though it may have plenty of memory you aren't going to be able to run well at high resolution with it. As a general rule if your hardware only lets you play games at a smooth 60fps in lower resolutions then you shouldn't expect substantially better performance in Big Picture itself - you'll need to run lower resolution there as well because the hardware just isn't capable.

i was this --><--- close to make epic flame and get permbanned from steam, but lets try this politely.

It is expected that with lower end systems you get bad performance, but if you choose what you buy/play you can get pretty much get reasonable results. When stuffing your basic launch platform full of unnecessary bling you same time exclude people who would otherwise get those reasonable results.

As for reasonable result i would expect menus and sound work without stutter even if videos might not work perfectly(if we forget that outside steam those will work 8) )

For example as wtf behaviour that newest addition steam music playback stutters like hell on higher resolutions but when game launch removes those animations it starts playing without stuttering.

So if we continue treat BPM as game of it is own that MUST be played with full graphical settings. Could there atleast be setting for selecting different resolution for BPM mode?

[123]

I'll add another reason to have more control over the removing (adding control) some of the bling (animation) from BP.
I have a lower end PC that BP is not targeting but I will tell you why I think it should.

Here are the specs.

Windows 7
Atom D410 1.6Ghz
4GB RAM
Nvidia ION 512MB HDMI


Pretty sad gaming computer right?

It is when it's actually running the game on it's own but when it's using Steams "In-Home Streaming" I can stream pretty much any graphically intense game to it at 60FPS. This works really well as long as I don't launch the game from BP. When using BP it chokes the computer enough to make the stream choppy. When launching it normal (non-BP) it runs smooth. I believe that removing (adding control) the animation at least and maybe some of the bling that streaming to this HTPC using an XBOX 360 controller and BP it becomes a nice TV/STEAM/LIVING ROOM experience. While my actual PC (GTX 780 SLI, I7) does all the work.

[jmccaskey]

We understand the desire for a more lightweight streaming client UI solution. Hopefully we'll have some solutions there in the future.

Unfortunately just turning off the animation and such won't actually help in any meaningful way though (see my answers previously at the top of this post). The real cost is all elsewhere and making Big Picture run on hardware that far below our target spec isn't going to happen right away. For streaming better solutions involve using the server PC to do more of the UI work and that may be something you see in the future.

[123]

Cool, I appreciate your reply. Yea I did read the above comments and realized that its more then just the animation but researching the animation is how I got to this thread and wanted to point out another reason for a lighter weight BP that might have not been thought of right away.

In-Home Streaming is pretty awesome as it allows my lower end HTPC to actually do more then just watch media. The fact that my ATOM processor and Nvidia ION can get a stream of a game at 60fps is just crazy. I mean I can play games on my TV better then a "next-gen" console system can do sometimes, although my main computer is doing the leg work, but still amazing.

Armed with the right info I think you all will come up with some elegant solution but obviously not over night. Keep up the good work. I also really like SteamVR (DK1, DK2 owner) work that is being done. I can't wait until most the bugs get squashed in the mode.

[v00d00m4n]

Цитата допису jmccaskey:

Can you describe your hardware specs? 70% CPU is high, but Big Picture isn't currently targeting very low end hardware.

The idea that turning off the background will help isn't really accurate. The particle system takes negligible CPU and ends up as a single draw batch on the GPU and as such is super cheap all around. It's more the complexity of the total UI and layering of various transparent items that creates the cost. It's substantial work for us to greatly decrease the cost and have a separate low fidelity design for really low end hardware so that probably won't happen soon.

i have been asking for plain static background option like 2 years ago and still having same problems in 2016 where big picture eats too much of performance which classic steam ui overlay does not!

Simple add plain rendering mode, without those fancy 3d alpha blended effects, we really dont need them rendered in background, its a serious waste of resources and you guys fail to undestand that like 2 years in a row. Right now im looking at performance and how steam big picture eats 5-20% of my CPU and GPU, in some games i get like 10-15 fps difference with big picture and without it, and i have to reduce big picture resolution to blury 720 on my 1080 tv, because if i use native resolution it eats even more of cpu and gpu.

I bumed to this thread whil i was googling for any unofficial way to disable this overlay, and yet no luck :-(

Please, i beg you, add simplified big picture rendering mode, without any facny 3d effects, only core ui elements. Just make it as lite as classic overlay and main ui in terms of resource usage and probably the way you render it.

P.s - my specs arent low - core i7 @ 3.6 ghz, Geforce GTx 680 4gb vram, EXTREME VOLTMOD OC to performance level of GTX 770-780, 16 gb ram, primocache for HDD that speed up disk perfromance to up to 6 gb per second on read and write (it does it in 8 gb of dedicated ram for L1 cache and 8 gb of ssd for L2 cache). I can play games like GTAV and Witcher 3 with almost everything maxed out at performance of 45-60 fps, but when i do that with big picture, i get like -10-15 fps in such games, this is unacceptable and this happens because Valve fail to realise that no 3d rendering should happen at all when game starts. all resources should be freed up, rendering stopped, and there should be permanent option to disable this effect to let big picture idle without wasting 20 of CPU and GPU and preventing it to enter power saving and less noisy mode.