Virtual Displays and System Overhead

[Steve Farris]

I'm diving in to a project with several odd shaped LED walls, and virtual displays make an elegant solution.  In the manual, it warns to be careful about creating too many virtual displays ("Using a large number of virtual displays may degrade the performance of your system.")  I'm just trying to figure out how many displays will start degrading performance.  I realize this is dependent on my system, I'm trying to understand how virtual displays impact overall performance. 

[Josef Swanberg]

Like you say, it's very dependent on your system, and what other things you want to do at the same time, like playing lots of high resolution video content may also have an impact on the performance. That is why it's very hard to give any general guidelines, you'll have to try it out and get a feeling for it yourself.

[mindopera]

Josef, I would imagined you’ve tested the machines Dataton is selling.  Take for instance the WATCHMAX 6x4K.  What are the limitations with virtual displays on that computer?

[Josef Swanberg]

11 hours ago, mindopera said:

Josef, I would imagined you’ve tested the machines Dataton is selling.  Take for instance the WATCHMAX 6x4K.  What are the limitations with virtual displays on that computer?

I really can't say. As usual there are no limitations in WATCHOUT to the amount of things you can do. There is no limitation on timelines, layers in timelines, video and image cues, and so on. And there is no limitation on the number of virtual displays.

When it comes to performance, it depends very much on your show: How many displays are connected to your device, what other things you want to do at the same time, like playing lots of high resolution video content. All those things can have an impact on the performance. That is why it's very hard to give any general guidelines, even on one specific device.

One thing I can say, is that having one high resolution virtual display, is much less heavy for the display computer, than having multiple low resolution virtual displays, that combined could have the same resolution as the high resolution one. That could be something to consider, when designing your show.

It's quite possible that we, in the future, may have some sort of benchmark examples. Like on this device you can play this many 4k videos while having that many virtual displays with this resolution. But that would just have to be examples, and couldn't possibly cover every use case.

In conclusion, you'll just have to try it out and see what works for you.