Why is Slate causing poor performance?

Hello,

Just wanted to mention something. It seems like on my non retina Macbook Pro with Nvidia GForce GT650M the performance of the editor is very poor. Even when I am doing nothing within the editor my fans are kicking in. I would expect that the CPU and GPU should do nothing right? There’s no need for screen redraw. What is happening?

On the other note I’ve lunched a Slate Viewer target in Xcode and it seems that only displaying some SlateUI I can see all my 8 virtual cores of the CPU are loaded up to 70%. Why is Slate so much expensive on resources?

You can stop rendering thread by unchecking “Realtime” in viewport options, it should stop GPU from being used all the time while not in PIE.

Can’t tell anything about Slate Viewer in that case.

Is there any specific tab in SlateViewer that makes it use that much of a CPU? I just tested briefly on my MacBook Pro and Mac Pro and SlateViewer was taking about 15-25% (depending on what tabs did I open) of single virtual core, so nowhere as bad as on your Mac…

The most expensive tab seems to be related with Elements (the one with on-going animation). You can see two screenshots. One with Slate running from Xcode and the other when the Xcode is closed. You can see what is happening with individual cores as well as overall Processor usage bar. Hope that helps. I would imagine that when nothing is happening on screen the cores should not be loaded right? Is it all because I am running it though Xcode in debug mode?

I don’t know what Xcode is doing (maybe indexing the project), but it seems like it’s Xcode, not SlateViewer that’s taking a lot of your CPU time.

As for your question about Slate UI using CPU when there’s nothing going on - I’m afraid that’s how Slate was designed - SlateViewer is refreshing/redrawing everything at 120 or 60 frames per second. As far as I know we started efforts to make it more notebook-friendly, but I’m not familiar with details, sorry.

Ok, that explains everything :wink:

This is my experience with SlateViewer as well. Constant 15% CPU consumption when nothing is changing in the window. Hopefully it’ll get better in the future.