I have recently made my first project with Shapespark, and I found out that the camera movements is smooth and lag free when I play it on my mobile. However, when I play it on my PC on full screen, the camera movements are very much laggy and feels like it’s lower than 10 FPS. When I play it in minimized mode then the transition of camera movements feels ok.
Can anyone tell me how can I solve this issue and get a smooth and lag free camera movements in Full Screen mode on my laptop.
We are aware of one similar case where FPS on desktop Chrome is slow when in a full screen mode. So far we haven’t been able to pinpoint the cause of this lag. Do you have Firefox browser on your laptop and could you test if Firefox works well?
OMG ! It works super smooth on Internet Explorer and Firefox. Haven’t tried it on Safari yet. Can you please fix up this ASAP, as Chrome is currently the No.1 Browser used worldwide and it can help a lot of ShapeSpark users…
To clarify, this is specific to some certain hardware configuration or drivers (we are not sure yet), normally Chrome works without such performance issues.
I see. However, this issue is same on my client’s PC, my alternate PC, and my friend’s PC as well. I have been testing this issue with all types of PCs but it seems it’s the same performance everywhere.
If you see it on all computers it must be some other issue. Could you upload a version of this scene without a video texture and see if it also has such problem? You can make a copy of the scene folder in Documents\Shapespark\ folder, not to remove the video from the original scene. As this is a rather small scene, perhaps a video codec or video resolution is causing troubles on Chrome. Shapespark is using video textures as uploaded in the editor, without any format transformation or resolution reduction, so a high resolution texture could cause performance issues.
Yes, I did feel that the performance improved when I removed the video texture. However, it wasn’t a perfect experience and there was still a visible lag which compromised user experience.
I had few doubts in my mind
Can using too many lights in a small scene affect performance ?
Can using too many textures on materials affect performance ?
Can using too many light probes affect performance ?
Can using too many reflective materials like glass or metal surfaces affect performance?
Can using a large file size of HDRI image as Sky affect performance?
Can the number of triangles in the scene affect performance?
Can using High res Light map affect performance as compared to low res Light map?
I have seen many scenes made using shapespark and have observed that many users don’t use full capabilities of the software in terms of material finishing and light baking. Is this something I should consider when I make my scene to give best performance and user experience to my clients ?
One surprising thing is that all of these performance issue only arises as I enter full screen. The experience is lag free when I view it on an embedded popup. So, I think there is something wrong only with the full screen mode and not with everything in shapespark.
To clarify by ‘full screen’ do you mean after pressing the f button, so the only thing on the screen is the scene, or when a browser occupies full screen, but still has address bar visible?
As for your performance related questions. Only the number of lights and size of the sky texture does not have any impact on runtime performance. This is because lights are baked, and are nor processed at runtime, and the sky texture is automatically scaled down, so no matter how large the input texture is, the output will have the same resolution.
Textures, light probes, reflective materials, geometry size and lightmap size all have some impact on how much work GPU has to perform. For smaller scenes this impact is negligible, because the GPU is still able to render 60 frames per second even if you add more textures, increase the lightmap resolution, or add a couple of additional objects.
Games usually have a lot of budget to dedicate to optimizations to ensure smooth performance on all devices. Archviz projects have much smaller budgets and much shorter time frame. Most Shapespark customers can’t afford to spend a month optimizing a scene and finding rendering bottlenecks on different devices. It could be more reasonable to follow a couple of rules of thumbs:
Try to use not more than 2 lightmaps
Try to keep the geometry size in 2-4 millions range. Often a scene will have a couple of very detailed objects, and replacing them will decrease the size significantly, without much work.
Usually, reducing the number of textures is not needed. Looking and Shapespark scenes, it looks like it is much easier to include complex geometries in a model than to include enough texture for them to become a performance bottleneck.
Use at most one light probe per room. If you have rooms without any interesting reflective materials, or rooms that are not important from presentation perspective (like storage), don’t include light probes there.
Look at other Shapespark scenes posted on this forum to see how large scenes are reasonable. Most scenes are apartments or houses. There are many office spaces, but they require more optimization work. Large projects, such as http://data.architektur-visualisierung.build/interaktiv/oekosiedlung3/index.html often target only desktop devices and could require a lot of additional work to run on mobile.
Thanks for writing in brief. I am clear on what the best practices are when making a scene now. By full screen, I mean when I press “F” key. The overall movement lag comes in when I enter F key mode. After optimization, I was able to reduce the lag somewhat, but still it’s not perfect and smooth like it is for other browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Can you please put some light on this issue as I am still facing it. When I use my Chrome browser, my scenes are very laggy in Fullscreen mode. When I run the same scene on Internet Explorer or any other browser, it works well.
Do you notice it in a particular scene, or in all your scenes?
The Lag is present in all the scenes but varies as per the scene. In some scenes, the lag is very minute and not so much noticeable. But in some scenes, it’s a total disaster.
Do you have a laptop with two graphics cards: an integrated Intel GPU and the dedicated GTX 1050? Perhaps, IE is configured to use the GTX 1050, whereas Chrome is configured to use the dedicated Intel GPU?
Yes, I have two GPUs - Integrated Intel GPU and GTX 1050
Thanks for sharing the link to the video. However, such laggy experience is not there when I use my Mobile phone with chrome, where I doubt there is a GPU boost to the browser.
Also, the tour/scene would be played by people located anywhere. Since chrome is the number 1 used browser, it isn’t possible to ask all of them to change their graphics settings. Is there a fix from shapespark’s side where we can solve this issue ?
One more point of thinking is that, such laggy experience is only when the scene is played on full screen (F12). When the scene is played with an iframe which doesn’t occupy entire screen, the lag is not there anymore.
We were able to reproduce laggy behavior on one of our machines, but it looked like a browser/drivers/OS issue. The laggy behavior occured for all WebGL websites, not only Shapespark.
We’ve just updated the NVIDIA drivers to the most recent version 451.67 and it helped. Could you check the drivers version on your laptop?
Upon updating my drivers to the latest version, the experience was still the same. Also, most of my clients are using Chrome as their default browser and have had many such laggy experiences which have also directly affected my presentation. Could you please tell why exactly is there a problem only with chrome in Full screen mode ? Is there a way where we can make it as smooth as other browsers like Microsoft Edge or Firefox. This will really be a big plus if chrome is also working like a charm like other browsers are.
We are investigating the issue and trying to reproduce it on our machines.
Would it be possible for you to provide us with screen capture showing the laggy performance? If possible please capture both the windowed and full-screen performance.