Does the colour quality of a VM affect it's performance? - color-palette

If you have a remote connection or a screenshare or whatever system where you're using a machine to look at another desktop on another machine, does the amount of colours affect the performance?
I'm not sure how Citrix VM vs Mikogo vs UltraVNC work with displaying information, but I've always guessed it's a combination of sending mouse and keyboard instructions and then refreshing the image to show what the display of the desktop is.
Now, if you have a .gif file with 265 colours, it's going to be smaller in filesize than one with 65million colours, because the palette is smaller, if I recall my image manipulation correctly.
Would a similar logic apply to remote connections? Would remoting into a machine and having 8-bit colours perform better than the same machine displaying 32 bit colour?
alt text http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f5/Plum.jpg

that deppends on configuration, the VM can be running on 32bit colors, but if you configure the transmission to be done in 8bit, it'll be faster, you can configure it to disable the VM background when accessing it to make the performance even better

Related

Mouse cursor Lag in Unity Editor user interface

I have 144 Hz monitor, when I move mouse around Unity Editor interface the it feels like the Unity drops refresh rate to 30 Hz (The mouse movment is very laggy, compared to other software's interfaces). Any suggestions how to solve it? THX!
While the accepted answer certainly does work, if you rather use a targeted approach you can also change the monitor refresh technology for Unity.exe to fixed in the control panel. This will address it for Unity and not force GSYNC in full screen only for other apps. You have to restart Unity for it to take affect.
Screenshot
after digging around I found that GSYNC was the issue. After switching to ONLY FULL SCREEN mode it worked!
Do you have some editor processes running in the background? Perhaps from a 3rd party tool? Sounds like it is checking for something expensive.
Go to Window/Analysis/Editor Iteration Profiler to test what could be slowing down the editor.
Another thing that comes to mind, are you using a laptop with a discrete GPU? You could have a power saving feature enabled to run graphically intensive applications (such as the Unity Editor) at a lower frame rate.

MATLAB: GUI suddenly zoomed-in and cropped

I had a GUI made using GUIDE. Suddenly when I reopened MATLAB the GUI window got resized, zoomed-in and cropped, missing the top of it. This shows in GUIDE itself as well.
I'm using the same computer and MATLAB version. I already tried to restart MATLAB and the computer itself.
The only thing I can think of that changed is a second monitor I was using, but I tried plugging it in and out, and it didn't help.
This doesn't happen in other GUIs I'm using.
Specs:
Windows 8, MATLAB R2013a, 1920x1080 screen resolution.
Try changing the units of all the controls to normalized.
MATLAB sizes GUIs based on system information about the size of the screen, so adding a second monitor could change that system information and confuse MATLAB. You could test if that is what caused the problem by unplugging the new monitor and restarting the computer/program.
For one project I had to change the units on everything to characters so that it would size appropriately for various screen sizes. Normalized should work too, however, it won't revert the gui to how it was before it got jacked up, only keep it from changing again.
So, try reverting to your original screen configuration and restarting the computer. If that resolves the problem, change your units to normalized or characters.

WinXP : after entering safemode display is fuzzy/blurry

I entered Safe Mode on an XP box (yeah, I know, it's OLD but it still works fine) and after it came out of it, the display is now blurry / fuzzy - across the entire display. From the icons on the desktop, to the font on Netscape, everything is now rendered in some kind of low resolution font that makes it unreadable.
I tried to get it to upgrade the display device driver, but it reported that it is 'up to date'.
This is just so strange .. I mean, why should going into safe mode result in an unusable computer?
Has anyone ever experienced something like this?
Ok, I guess I will have to probably scrap this box. I'm feeling down. But, this is not the way it should come to an end.
TIA !!
DOn
When you enter in Safe Mode, low resolution video is activated, but doesn't change anything IN the hardware, your video card might be damaged, usually weird colors and crappy random images are a memory error common problem, the buffer to show the image, is corrupted.

How to Repair Microsoft Surface v2 Enter Surface Mode

We've received the new Microsoft Surface v2 this week, and I've done something such that it broken the Surface Mode.
What should happen
I could double-tap the shortcut to Enter Surface Mode, say ok to the dialogs that popped up, and it would take me to the SurfaceLoader (a program that just shows a ring of particles pulsing in an out of the center). After a moment, the water-simulation Attract program would pop-up, where I could touch the center surface logo to see the list of registered Surface programs.
What happens instead
I double-tap the shortcut to Enter Surface Mode (turning on debugging), and nothing comes up past SurfaceLoader. It seems that the other programs are running, but SurfaceLoader is aggressively maintaining focus.
What might have messed things up
Installed my Surface 1 Application
Made my Surface 1 Application run on startup
Installed Surface SDK Samples
(Maybe) accidentally moved an important file elsewhere - (just because its so easy to accidentally moving things on the Surface in Windows 7 Touch.)
Let's go over each of these.
For my Surface 1 Application, built in XNA using the Surface 1 SDK, we used an .msi installer to install the program. It ran, but being that Surface 1 is built around a small program called SurfaceInput.exe running in the background, the program did not respond to input. The program was run at startup through a registry key.
I have uninstalled the program through the control panel (double check this)
I have double-checked the registry to make sure the keys are not still there
For the Surface SDK Samples, I got them from the Microsoft Surface 2 SDK at: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26716. After installing the SDK, I navigated (on the Surface) to C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft SDKs/Surface/v2.0/Samples/Surface Code Samples.zip. I extracted the zipped files, and installed them with InstallSamples.bat. Installation succeeded normally.
At some point, I was able to see a list of these in the Surface Application Launcher screen. I can no longer get to that point, so I'm unable to exactly recreate my steps.
I'm not sure where these examples extract to - the placement does not seem to be contained in InstallSamples.bat file, and I cannot find them with Windows Search. Perhaps they are built in the same folder and merely registered elsewhere with the Surface, but since then I have done a series of System Backups. When examining the Surface Configuration Editor, BingSurface is the only Application registered with it, leading me to believe these are probably not the cause.
Finally I may have accidentally moved some arbitrary file to some other directory. This does sound rather horrible of me, and while I don't recall an instance where I've done this, it is incredibly easy to accidentally move a file or folder when Surface is in Windows 7 Touch mode. Even while writing this, I somehow moved the taskbar from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen while it was locked with just two touches. I don't think this is the problem, but its easy enough to do that I can't rule it out either.
To remedy this, I have tried Windows System Restore. I was able to restore to a point after installing my Surface 1 app, but I have tried twice to Restore to the original state of the surface without success. I waited 10-20 minutes for System Restore to show progress, and both times it stayed on the Initializing screen. It was not graphically frozen, as the Windows loading circle was spinning, but from my previous experiences 20 minutes seemed to be way too long for this process to be going correctly.
Things that do not work
Running Enter Surface Mode w/ debugging - eternal loading screen. Can alt+tab to see Attract is running, but does not switch focus to Attract window. Can hear the sounds of Attract play when I touch the surface on the loading window.
Running Surface Shell - eternal loading screen. Can hear the sounds of attract play.
Running Enter Surface Mode w/ debugging in Single Application Mode set to SurfaceBing - eternal loading screen. Alt+tab reveals its running, but does not switch focus to bing window.
Running Surface Shell in Single Application Mode set to SurfaceBing - eternal loading screen. Alt+tab reveals its running, but does not switch focus to bing window.
Running Surface Loader - running it directly causes same problems as above.
Things that do work
Compiled Sample Project RawImageVisualizer on separate system - runs great on the surface. Can see what the pixelsense is seeing.
Launching Bing for Microsoft Windows Directly - works just as it should
Launching Attract directly from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Surface\v2.0\Attract - watery program comes up just as it should.
Environment Lighting Optimizer - works totally fine.
It seems like something happened to SurfaceLoader, such that it thinks it should always be on top of everything. I shall give System Restore another go, allowing it a full hour. I will also double-check the properties of SurfaceLoader to make sure it doesn't have anything akin to "run on top" checked.
I know Surface 2 is new, but I would greatly appreciate any tips you have.
You've probably figured it out by now, but for posterity's sake, I'm guessing you didn't have permissions set correctly. You should always run the Surface Shell/Enter Surface Mode as Administrator or set the properties to always run as admin. Your own programs always need high level permission. If you don't run as admin, it seems to raise the alert window you get when Windows7 asks for higher level permissions but you never see it. It just waits and waits. "Surface Mode" is actually just a special user that's hidden until you enter it and never runs Windows Explorer or shows the desktop. So you have to deal with Windows 7 permissions to have programs run for both users. Hope that helps!

Is it possible to detect if the hardware display has completed the process of switching between display modes?

The reason I ask is because I just bought a new LCD that takes approximately 5 seconds to change between display modes, such as from 1920x1080x32bpp to 1280x800x32bpp. Does a programmatic solution exist to detect if the display is ready for video output?
I believe the answer is 'no'. Once the display adapter starts transmitting a new signal in a new refresh rate, etc., it has absolutely no way of knowing how long it takes the display to internally process the change and start showing an image. This is a hardware limitation with both DVI and VGA signals, not a software one.