MacOS Catalina (10.15.6) Horrible Cursor/Pointer Performance while Rendering

Shift Studio

Shift Studio

0
I recently upgraded from Mac OS Mohave to Catalina.

When I begin a render, scenes are rendering with about the same speed as always. But my mouse cursor lags very badly in Cheetah, Finder and all other Applications, making any work during a render very aggravating. Cheetah rendering has slowed down things in the past if the scenes were heavy, but never this bad – and its happening on simple scenes.
One interesting thing to note is using a mouse to move the cursor is bad, but using my Wacom Pen Tablet is 2-3x worse (and I pretty much exclusively use the Wacom)

Can anyone shed some light? I see 10.15.7 is out as of today I think. I may see if that improves anything...
Thanks in advance!
– Shift Studio.

p.s. This is using Cheetah 3D v7.5b1
p.p.s. Same problem in Cheetah 3D v7.3.2
p.p.p.s Also panning around in a scene is also very 'jumpy' during a render - not sure if it's because system performance is being effected, or if its due to cursor being 'jumpy'
 
Last edited:
The newer Cheetah versions have have Render Thread setting in the render panel.
Maybe reducing the cores used will help.
 
ZooHead said:
The newer Cheetah versions have have Render Thread setting in the render panel.
Maybe reducing the cores used will help.
Click to expand...
Wow - that seems to make a big difference! So the value in my Render Threads was 0. I guess that means all available 'threads'.
Do you think threads = cpu threads? I have a 6-Core Mac Pro 6,1 and that has 12 threads.
If I put in a value of 9 that would be 75% of computing power - is that right?

Thanks!
--shift studio.
 
Yes I do think threads = cpu threads
But it might be the other way around- 9= threads not used.
You'll have to experiment. I smell bad Applesauce.
 
:rolleyes: When experimenting, you can check the activity monitor (in the utilities folder) to monitor the resultant performance parameters. Tab to Memory to check the threads. This should quickly give you an idea of any constructive fiddles in the set up.
 
I did a little render testing but not with activity monitor:

Render Threads is first number:
0 takes 40 seconds
2 takes 145 seconds
10 takes 44 seconds
11 takes 43 seconds
12 takes 40 seconds

with a setting of 10, I can move my mouse around and get some work done.
11 isn't too bad either.

If I come up with more info about this, I'll post it in case it can help anyone.

--shift studio.
 
So, seems like 9 or 8 is more effective when I need to get work done while rendering...
I'm curious - no one else is having this issue?

--shift studio
 
I don't use Catalina and when I render I actually need it to fire on every cylinder or it takes forever ... Rendering = Coffee time or doing whatever else I have to do without the computer ... But I remember this very well from my windows days with every render I ever tried (only there it was quite easy to solve).

The problem with this solution is of course that you pay with render time on all renders, or you change before every render down to 10 threads or so, and if you forget ...

I'm not 100 % sure but I suspect using Catalina more memory for the system itself (which would certainly contribute to your problem) while at the same time not being able to prioritize as well as in older versions. What you do should have a higher priority than the render which it doesn't as it seems. It could be, though, that some app running in the background is the reason for this, some driver app, whatever. Maybe there is something you can close before rendering.

Anyway, you can change the priority of a process, but it doesn't seem that there is a permanent solution for this. You'll always need the processor id of the But maybe you want to have a look into this (the only newer result I found was this here https://superuser.com/questions/42817/is-there-any-way-to-set-the-priority-of-a-process-in-mac-os-x along with a sister thread on the same forum. Or this one, which is from 2005, https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/process-priority-in-osx.126007/, where 5 years later someone posted a link to a program that allegedly can be used also for prioritizing (from the looks of it just via slider). But before installing it you might want to look into it a bit further (security and so), and I don't have a clue if it really runs on catalina or not (probably not without you giving it the necessary rights).

In windows it really was as easy as that poster describes (only it could sometimes take forever til that window opened and reacted till you actually could lower the priority of the render process).

So, telling Cheetah not using all available CPU threads you can only do beforehand, prioritize the rendering process you can only after you started it ...

Anyway, maybe this helps you a bit.
 
@Hasdrubal thanks for the comprehensive response! I am going to look into these things and report back here.
One thing that specifically stands out is the idea of a driver causing trouble. When I updated to Catalina, my old Wacom tablet was no longer supported (I wasn't surprised) and now I have a new one - and the driver/system pref seems flakey - always asking me to 'allow' it access but I've already done that on first day...
thanks again!
--shift studio.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top