Intel quad-core with HyperThreading Windows 7 64-bit Xara use

[Albacore]

I am quad core, Vista, 32 bit and I gave up using version 5 yesterday for the same reason. Had cartoon that I had drawn on lower layer and was tracing around it with lower layer locked. I got so fed up with the stuttering when moving things around that I just went back to version 4. The only thing that I had up at the same time was Firefox. I am a bit miffed at the moment.

[juergen]

Phil,

I would be available for any kind of testing if that helps. One machine here is clean Win7 64bit on I720 12 gig, Vertex 120, Nvidia 285. Only VMWare and Xara installed showing all symptoms described.

[Xhris]

Hi Phil,

No, the 4 cores are subject to negligible use (just minimum system resources) and it will happen. This also wouldn't explain the non-stuttering when the object fills the screen (by being large or zoomed in).

The CPU is the Intel Core i7 Extreme. Xara is the only software which suffers from the problem; other graphics software e.g. Inkscape don't suffer from it (although I'm not sure they utilitise multiple CPU cores).

There is a little bit of stuttering on my dual core laptop but its not as pronounced as here. It seemed to start from V4 onwards. I could check V3.2 when I get the CDs back in a few weeks and install it on this machine.

V4 behaves the same as V5 on my machine too.

Weren't there some registry keys you could change to make Xara use 1 core? I could try that.

[jeffb]

8gb ram, intel quad overclocked to 3.8, vista ultimate 64 bit, no trouble here drag it all over the place as fast as you like

[PhilM]

Hi Juergen,
Thanks for the offer. Can you try the suggestion at the end of this message and post your results? It's not a fix but just a diagnostic test. (You need to be familiar with editing the registry.)

Hi Xhris,

Hi Phil,

No, the 4 cores are subject to negligible use (just minimum system resources) and it will happen. This also wouldn't explain the non-stuttering when the object fills the screen (by being large or zoomed in).

Well, in my experience you can get some pretty non-obvious behaviour from multi-threading systems!

There is a little bit of stuttering on my dual core laptop but its not as pronounced as here. It seemed to start from V4 onwards. I could check V3.2 when I get the CDs back in a few weeks and install it on this machine.
V4 behaves the same as V5 on my machine too.

That may be the best clue yet because it implies that the problem is not new and may be an issue across various machine setups (which would make sense of the different reports in this thread).

Weren't there some registry keys you could change to make Xara use 1 core? I could try that.

Yes, please try changing
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Xara\XtremePro\5.1\Opti ons\Rendering\MaximumThreads to 1. Obviously we'd expect rendering to be much slower when it's only able to use 1 core at a time but what we want to know is, can you then drag a simple object around without the stuttering that you have been seeing.

Thanks,

Phil

[steve.ledger]

I could check V3.2 when I get the CDs back in a few weeks and install it on this machine.

Or download 3.2 from your client area at Xara/Magix?

[juergen]

Phil,

here my observations.
With just one thread enabled the software reacts quicker right from the start. Your guess is correct, the stuttering is gone completely.
What I didnt mention before is that with the original settings, if you move an image around with any of the sliders, the stuttering is ALWAYS there. Before doing the registry change I did not mention it.
Now with just one thread, the UI feels much more responsive.
I looked a bit closer, raised the maximal number of threads one by one and, as you might expect now, things change > 4. And on top, 8 threads cause visibly more stutter than 7 than 6 than 5.
So for now I have the value set to 4. Other option for me would be to turn HT off in Bios.
I would guess that the difference between a physical and a virtual core can cause problems.
If you need anything else checked, just say so.

Juergen