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Faq

General

Q: Can you make X thing run faster?

Most likely not, but maybe- I'm very sensitive to speeds and latencies by myself, and have already done lots of optimizations and micro-benchmarks to squeeze the most out of the hardware and language I use. Sure, there are always things that can be improved, but anything past doing stuff in parallel (rendering), and specially if the CPU/GPU are already nearing 100% usage on your system, it's simply a matter of the hardware's capabilities.

DepthFlow / ShaderFlow

Q: The program closes right before rendering (segfaults)

Your hardware probably doesn't support rendering while there are mapped buffers in OpenGL, which happens when TurboPipe is enabled (default). This is likely to take place on older systems (GTX <= 800) or integrated GPUs from Intel or AMD and/or hybrid systems.

Fix: disable it on the main command as in depthflow main (...) --no-turbo

Sidenote: There's no easy way to detect support for it. Most users have a decently modern GPU and the speed gains are too good to pass on, so it's enabled by default

Q: Rendered videos are black

This seems to be a problem in hybrid systems, that is, a system that has both an integrated and dedicated GPU. While rendering in live mode in either GPU should work, OpenGL or Windows seems to have issues reading the rendered frames data from a GPU that is not the primary one.

See the next question #wrong-gpu for a fix.

Q: Wrong GPU being used for rendering

ShaderFlow says which GPU is being used for rendering:

│DepthFlow├┤...│ Initializing scene 'DepthScene' with backend WindowBackend.GLFW
│DepthFlow├┤...│ OpenGL Renderer: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060/PCIe/SSE2

However, Hybrid Systems (Multiple GPUs) may be using the "wrong" one. This can cause issues such as black videos, low performance, artifacts, corrupted frames, etc:

│DepthFlow├┤...│ Initializing scene 'DepthScene' with backend WindowBackend.GLFW
│DepthFlow├┤...│ OpenGL Renderer: Intel(R) RaptorLake-S Mobile Graphics Controller

Fixing this highly depends on your platform:


Windows with NVIDIA • thanks to @stephanedebove

  • Open the NVIDIA Control Panel, go to Manage 3D Settings → Global Settings
  • Under Preferred Graphics Processor select High-performance NVIDIA processor
  • Apply the changes, run depthflow/shaderflow again


Others (any)

Help needed: What are the instructions here?