Tag: VGA Acceleration

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Exacq Client Settings

exacq Client Settings

Use the Client settings page to customize the look and behavior of your ExacqVision Client software.

Change the look of the video panel displays, select audio devices for 2-Way Audio use, change how video streams are managed, change client color themes, enable or disable VGA Acceleration or GPU Decoding, enable Video Push, and more.

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What is the VGA Acceleration Mode feature on the Client page?

The process of decompressing and displaying hundreds of video images per second is processor-intensive. It is possible to use the capabilities of modern display adapters to offload the main workstation processor from some of this work.<br>

The ExacqVision Desktop Client tries to automatically determine the best operational mode and colorspace for the available display hardware. Because various display adapter vendors have different levels of support or tests for the various modes and colorspaces, occasionally situations arise where the automatically detected mode does not work properly. The Client settings page allows the user to control the selection of the mode and colorspace of the display acceleration.<br>

The following modes are available:

  • In Auto mode, the Client will attempt to detect the correct GPU decoded path for your operating system. The Client will revert to None automatically if it detects that the display adapter does not support that mode.
  • In Direct3D mode, additional options are available for selecting specific colorspaces. Direct3D is a decoding method developed by Microsoft for Windows only GPU decoding. Direct3D enables applications to interact with display hardware from any vendor that provides a Direct3D driver and provides a method for applications to determine the modes of hardware acceleration that are available in the display hardware.
  • In OpenGL mode, additional options are available for selecting specific colorspaces. OpenGL is a cross-platform GPU decoding method, meaning it can be used on non-Windows operating systems as well. When selecting OpenGL, the processor decompresses the frame and provides it to the display adapter in a supported colorspace. The display hardware scales the image and copies it to the overlay buffer. Each time the monitor retraces, the display adapter combines the frame buffer with the overlay buffer to produce an output. This mode offers the best performance because the workstation processor does not have to scale images or convert colorspace. It also reduces flicker because any onscreen graphics are in the frame buffer, which is independent of the images that are updated in the overlay buffer.
  • In None mode, the workstation processor does all the work and makes no use of display adapter acceleration. The None setting for VGA acceleration is the most conservative setting in terms of minimizing potential issues with VGA drivers. However, selecting None requires more CPU horsepower to decompress and display images in the Client.

NOTE: While the None mode is reliable, because it does not depend on a driver from the display adapter manufacturer, this mode could result in a reduced displayable frame rate if the workstation processor is 100% in use. You can assess this setting in a Windows Client by running Task Manager and monitoring CPU usage while running in Live Mode. Remember that a single instance of the Client cannot run on multiple cores, so if you have a two-core processor, it might display 50% CPU usage when fully loaded by a single Client.

The following article may also help in determining the cause of any frame rate discrepancies.
Lower Frame Rates Displayed Than Expected

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Enabling Font Smoothing

Operating systems display text in the form of glyphs. You can view these on Windows systems using the included Character Map tool. Each character is a glyph; a visual set of pixels that represents a character. While this method is easy to display, it could result in text with a “jagged” appearance depending on your monitor and settings. In the case of small text this may cause the text to be difficult to read. Similarly, some languages may use characters with many closely placed lines that may be difficult to read.

The characters shown below are the of the same font and font size. Characters on top have no font smoothing. Characters on the bottom have font smoothing enabled. (Enlarged for illustrative purposes.)

Different solutions have been created over time to help resolve this issue and depend somewhat on your operating system.

Anti-aliasing utilizes pixels of varying opacity to “smooth” the curves and edges of each glyph. However, on low resolution monitors very small text begins to appear blurry. For this reason, it was not used by Mac or Windows on small text.

Font smoothing was created to address some of the issues with anti-aliasing. Font smoothing uses sub-pixel rendering, which Microsoft calls ClearType. Sub-pixel rendering directly controls the red, green, and blue components of the millions of pixels in LCD monitors to emulate a resolution three times larger than normal. Microsoft windows provides font smoothing, using ClearType, on Windows 7, 8, 10, and 11.

An advantage to disabling font smoothing is that when the ExacqVision Desktop Client is using VGA Acceleration, the on-screen display (OSD) can appear sharper on top of the video.

Enabling / Disabling Font Smoothing via Client on Windows.

Click on the Client node from the navigation tree within the client’s Configuration mode. Toggle the Disable Windows Font Smoothing checkbox (pictured).

Enabling / Disabling Font Smoothing via Windows OS

To affect font smoothing system-wide. Click the Windows Start menu button and search for ‘ClearType’. Select the ‘Adjust ClearType text’ result. Follow the prompts from Windows to adjust as desired.

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