Issue with Display Quality & GPU Acceleration

[Billybeanbag]

I am running ASP 11 on a brand new Macbook Pro with an AMD R9 Graphics card and if I select GPU acceleration in display settings all the vector shapes lose their curves and revert to straight edges during playback. Has anyone else had this issue? I assumed with the graphics card in the macbook and this box ticked the playback would be improved.

[synthsin75]

This is a known issue. It won't effect rendered animation.

[Billybeanbag]

Do you know if this known issue is a conflict with this graphics card in particular or El Capitan or on all Macs etc

[synthsin75]

No, I have a GeForce GTX 970M on a Windows 8.1 Alienware gaming machine, and I see that problem too. I'm not sure, but this may have been a compromise between GPU acceleration and trying to achieve real-time playback on average graphics cards.

[Billybeanbag]

So I contacted their support to check and they were very helpful. This is from the reply:


I spoke with the engineers and this is what they have to say:

QUOTE
In GPU mode, vector shapes need to be diced up into triangles. This can get expensive, so despite the speedup of the GPU, we lose time chopping everything into triangles. During playback, to limit the slowdown, the triangle breakup becomes coarser – fewer triangles means it goes faster, but looks more faceted.

This is a known issue with the GPU mode. It affects large shapes with few points. With more complex artwork this isn’t as noticeable. Turning off GPU mode in the Display Quality panel will make this go away.
END QUOTE

So basically, although GPU acceleration helps in most cases, this is one of the cases where it does the opposite, as GPU acceleration would actually take more processing power and thus slow down the preview animation. So the problem isn’t with your GPU specifically, but all GPUs in general under this particular situation.

[slowtiger]

Thx for taking the time to further inspect, this information was new to me.