f.lux very slow fading

nallenalle

Hi

Is there a way to disable the fade process when the white balance is changed? My laptop (which is using the latest drivers btw) slows down to a crawl whenever it fades. Disabling the fade would be nice.

Thanks

lorna

If you have time, could you post your GPU and driver info for our records? We try to report bugs with drivers whenever possible and "to a crawl" is something we haven't seen for a while now. Are you using the 20 second fade now?

nallenalle

Hi,

GPU: Intel HD Graphics (Core i5 4310U)
Driver: 25/09/2015, driver version 10.18.14.4294

I'm using flux 3.10, where is the 20s option?

Thanks

Doggie52

@lorna Hi, I'm getting this issue too. I'm using the 20s fade and it causes enormous lag during the transition, a bit like when FPS drops in a game. Same effect.

I'm using an onboard Intel HD 4600 as well as an NVIDIA GTX 860M. I'm on a laptop running Windows 10 x64. All my drivers are the latest versions available from NVIDIA and Intel respectively.

nallenalle

@Doggie52 said:

@lorna Hi, I'm getting this issue too. I'm using the 20s fade and it causes enormous lag during the transition, a bit like when FPS drops in a game. Same effect.

I'm using an onboard Intel HD 4600 as well as an NVIDIA GTX 860M. I'm on a laptop running Windows 10 x64. All my drivers are the latest versions available from NVIDIA and Intel respectively.

This is what I'm seeing too. Not sure what else I can provide to troubleshoot?

Thanks

Tungsten_smooth

@nallenalle The 20s option is to the right of where you select the color you want. It clearly says "transition speed", with two options, 20s and 60m.

nallenalle

@Tungsten_smooth said:

@nallenalle The 20s option is to the right of where you select the color you want. It clearly says "transition speed", with two options, 20s and 60m.

Yes, but that's not helpful. 20s is laggy and 60 minutes is too long. I'd like an "instant" option.

Tungsten_smooth

@nallenalle What you'd really like is non buggy video drivers! :)

nallenalle

@Tungsten_smooth said:

@nallenalle What you'd really like is non buggy video drivers! :)

That would be really nice too, of course. Is it possible to report this to Intel? I'm suspecting they'll just blame the app.

Tungsten_smooth

@nallenalle Well, let's do some other tests, and show them that it may be the drivers. Play a game, uh, you're own your own here, maybe world of goo or something, and if that's really slowing down your computer, than it's the drivers.

When I first installed an intel video driver, this game I was playing was so much faster, maybe 3x as fast! I was SHOCKED. It made me say "THAT'S what drivers do! Cool". Now there are these reports of them making performance worse, how can they get worse at something as time goes on? Do they not care?

Doggie52

Gentlemen, let's get a grip on reality here. This is not a driver problem -- I'm stunned that this is even being brought up as a potential culprit.

Firstly, I have two GPUs in my laptop as I wrote before: one HD4600 and one GTX 860M. The latter can handle the latest games on medium/high at 60+ FPS. Even the former can deal with moderately intensive games at acceptable framerates.

Secondly, I have never seen this problem in any other software or game, ever. Period. Nothing like this -- this is a flux-exclusive problem. 100%.

I'm not saying this can't be a problem in the interaction between flux and the drivers -- yes, this is quite possibly the problem! But to contact a driver developer with complaints about this is utterly futile and the wrong approach. I would like to see someone look into this from flux's side first, instead of blaming driver design.

herf

@Doggie52 You may not be aware that drivers have worked this way for 20 years, and it's only in the last two years that there have been these kinds of performance problems. (Among other things, there are lots of people trying to optimize power usage with clever backlight tricks.) And yes, you are right that games and fillrate are very fast on these cards, but when someone checks in code like "when someone changes the screen calibration, wait for a couple screen refreshes before unlocking the GPU" it really doesn't work. The 2-D drivers always get less attention than the newest game.

We've had a lot of luck with every major vendor reporting performance regressions -- when an old version is fast and a new version is slow, they will often fix it. Recent drivers have been much better than the ones in 2014, for instance.

But our options are limited otherwise: If your computer locks up for a half-second every time we make a change, you will notice, and there is not very much we can do to work around it. We already dial back our animation speeds to accommodate slow drivers.

Doggie52

@herf Point taken. What if something like an instant animation were introduced? So that, at the very least, the slowing up could be kept as short as possible?

herf

@Doggie52 yes the major challenge is that these effects are sometimes invisible to us - so the driver says "everything worked really fast!" when in reality it has locked the GPU.

If you are in the 5% of users who will go looking through menus to find an option to fix it, that's great, but I also need to find a way to detect that this is happening. While our UI is up I might be able to see it.

Doggie52

@herf Cool! I see the problem. I'm happy to assist with any kind of debugging or whatever you might need, as I can reliably reproduce this.

Appreciate the speed and approachability of you guys, by the way! Very commendable. Just wanted to mention that :) .

mbjerggaard

I used to have this issue a couple years back when it started the 20s transition i would get terrible lags in games, but after switching to the 60m transition i actually prefer that much more as i get a smoother more comfortable transition that isn't very noticeable and i dont get lags in games.