I&#39;m working with a high-powered machine but I&#39;m running into a bottleneck with Gem. I&#39;m running at 20fps and at times was intending to have as many as 200+ lines and spheres on a 1024x768 screen. At around 60 lines/spheres I&#39;m already at 50% CPU. I know the problem is Gem because if I stop rendering, CPU immediately drops to less than 4%. There&#39;s some other manipulations I use periodically too causing another 40%+ of CPU so I&#39;m a far cry from my 200+ intention while saturating my computational limits. If I turn lighting off, BTW, I already gain 10% CPU back (not an option I want to explore.)<br>

<br>I&#39;m not sure what to do and was even considering breaking the rendering into independent screens (this machine has 8 cores), then using pix_share to recombine them in a &quot;master&quot; instance. I&#39;d have to use pix_snap to capture each of the Gem windows in each of the processes, and each one draws about 40% CPU when capturing a 1024x768 buffer at 20 fps so besides creating a headache for myself this is going to be a lot of CPU overhead. I also don&#39;t know how the graphics card is fitting into all of this, if it would become a bottleneck at some point, how to tell, etc. What&#39;s the &quot;top&quot; command for a graphics card? :-)<br>

<br>These lines and spheres are nothing special, btw. No texturing, just translates, colors, and alpha. the lines are made with curves of 2 points each.<br><br>Is there some trick or some area of programming or using the graphics card I need to be considering? Any thoughts/advice would be appreciated. It&#39;s strange --- I don&#39;t think I&#39;m seeing performance on this machine much better than on my not-so-special laptop.<br>

<br>This machine has Nvidia GeForce GTX 460, Ubuntu 10.10 32 bit, Pd-extended 0.42-5 binary from the Pure Data site, Intel i7 3Ghz. I&#39;m using Nvidia proprietary driver 290.19.06.<br><br>When I say stuff like &quot;40% CPU&quot; I mean for a single core. So in theory this machine has 800% CPU limit in my nomenclature. But since an instance of Pd/Gem runs on only a single core, I have a limit of 100% for any single Pd/Gem instance (as most of you already know I&#39;m sure.)<br>

<br>-John<br><br>P.S. I&#39;m loving working with Gem and pmpd these days. Awesome stuff, guys! :-)<br><br><br><br><br><br>