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[Janeen Bahrke]

Ive been struggling with something for quite some time now. I experience stutter / lag in COLORFUL BigBox Theme. I've uploaded 2 videos on YouTube showing what I mean. The first one shows BigBox with Critical Zone theme running smoothly, the second one shows the COLORFUL theme lagging when scrolling through platform categories. The same lag occurs when scrolling through platforms as well.

I've already posted about this issue a while back in @viking's COLORFUL theme thread, but a solution couldn't be found. I'm hoping that the videos I've linked make my problem clearer.

1. Critical Zone without lag:

EDIT: I should also mention that the lag in COLORFUL occurs mainly when scrolling through the platform categories for the first time. Once I've scrolled through everything once, there is considerably less lag. But every time re restart BigBox, the lag returns.

I'm thinking it's possible that your display resolution is set at 30hz instead of 60hz, which would cause mouse lag and stuttering. You can check this better in the nvidia control panel and going to the page and make sure you set it to be your native display resolution @ 60hz. (looks like a tv in your case). 4k is 3840x2160 @ 60hz. I've had this happen to me once where it defaulted to 30hz.

On your TV, go to its picture settings, find the advanced options. Turn off trumotion or w/e they call it, turn off all the processing features nobody needs anymore. This varies by TV what they are called but most tvs have some fake motion processing crap on by default.

I have a 8700 running at stock speeds, 16gb ram, evga 970, evo 960 ssd with an OLED tv. Runs smooth as butter. The reason why nobody has a solution for you is because nobody else has this problem. 2Tb isn't enough to hold over 120K in computer games and whatever else you have. So did you move the video and images folders for the platforms to another drive by chance?

Have you benchmarked the computer recently and compared it to prior benchmarks? I would benchmark your ssd and compare your results with others online, SSDs drop in performance if they are heavily used.

In the launchbox settings, did you set the video player to use VLC? Set it to use VLC, that's a must. You can try to enable the intel iGPU in the bios (update your bios firmware while you're at it). That way the deskop apps use the intel gpu which is more efficent and may help. my bios called is igpu multi monitor (nothing to do with monitors, terrible name. Basically enabled the intel gpu while using the nvidia gpu at the same time. Once you do that, you'll see the gpu in Device Manager, go to the intel website and download drivers utility to update the graphics driver for the intel gpu, as well as any chipset drivers / wifi /etc you may have.

8. All my drivers are up to date. I use the drivers form the MSI homepage for everything except for the GPU. Should I get different drivers? I was under the assumption that the MSI drivers would be the best ones for the hardware.

EDIT: uninstalling MSI software has not solved the issue.

EDIT 2: According to Intel, all my drivers are up to date

One more thing I thought I should mention: Once I've scrolled through all the platform categories once, the lag disappears / is drastically reduced when I switch through them a second or third time. I've also noticed the mouse curser turning into the blue wheel indicating that something loading. I contacted the author of the colorful theme about this, because I had a theory that the theme will count all the games in a certain platform and that's what causes the lag. However, the author said that Colorful isn't counting anything. So I'm not sure.

What else could be "loading" while scrolling through platform categories for the first time?

Thanks for replying. Hope you're alright. Covid is a mess.

I've done some more testing and I found something else out:

I redownloaded Launchbox and set up a test version of Launchbox with Platforms with only one game per platform:

- SNES

- Apple II

- GBA

- Arcade

When I launch Bog box with this setup, Colorful runs smoothly. So far so good.

Then I copied the platforms and parents from the Data Folder of my Main Launchbox setup over to the test setup. This setup has all my games listed. When I Launched Big Box again, the lag returns.

In conclusion, Colorful runs smoothly, when there are just a few games imported. As soon as the number of roms increases, the lag returns. There must a some kind of difference between colorful and other themes, that make it lag when the number of games gets too high.

If you want to test this, I can send you the contents of my data folder and you can try if you experience the same kind of lag that I experience.

Sadly, that didn't work. Now I'm completely out of ideas. I'm sure it has something to do with the large number of games in my collection, but I cannot figure out why other themes work and colorful does not.

I guess I'll just have to live without colorful (sadly...)

Thank you for all your effort.

I have thousands of games for various platforms, over 8000. That's not your issue, neither is storing them on a different drive. My specs are comparable to yours. Storing your games on a HDD shouldn't be causing this and I doubt it is. I have colorful 4k platform videos and downloaded the highest quality video snaps. I run my desktop at 4k and everything is super quick, especially video playback.

Intel has a processor diagnostic tool, download that. it's more of a CPU stress test, will max out the cpu more than any benchmark I found. It will also tell you if you have a thermal load issue or calculation issues.

In your video, you are not using the colorful platform videos. Have you tried downloading the colorful HD platform videos (would also make the theme look a lot better in your setup...) Mayeb it's the platform videos you are using. They could be encoded with a more cpu intensive encoding.

Wow, thank you so much for your answer. Let me go through your points in order:

1. VLC player is set in LauchbBox as well as in BigBox. I Also tried switching to Windows Media Player, which didn't solve the problem.

2. I don't think that the CPU is the issue, since BigBox does not stress my CPU all THAT much. But I downloaded the Intel CPU tool and launched it. The tool set that my CPU passed all the tests, as you can see here:

3. I downloaded CrystalDiskMark and checked the result against other results online. I think the results are comparable? I've added a screenshot, so maybe you can confirm. The 2 results on the left are from a website, the the window on the right shows my benchmark.

4. I wil enable the iGPU then. However, I've read online that if you have a dedicated GPU you shouldn't really enable the iGPU. I'm actually not really sure how I would use the iGPU in combination with my regular GPU. All my displays are connected to the Nvidia GPU anyway. So how would I even use the iGPU?

5. I've tried both the the 4k as well as the HD versions of COLORFUL videos. I switched them out again, because @viking originally suggested that maybe my PC couldn't handle the 4K videos. What I do know now is that the videos are not the issue. All videos, COLORFUL or not, work with other themes.

Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to answer =).

When starting an application, Windows 10 will decide what GPU an application requires. So if gaming, Windows 10 will use a discrete graphics card. For web browsing or productivity it will switch to a power saving GPU. Another change is an option so users can assign a specific GPU to individual applications.

Also it depends, you can have your iGPU dedicated to hardware encoding, while you set the nvidia GPU for hardware decoding. For example with the steamlink, I gave the iGPU doing the encoding/decoding so it's not affecting performance on my 970 that runs the games. I can see similar benefits for twitch streaming and more.

There's really no downside to enabling it. IntelQuickSync only works on iGPUs (quick dedicated video encoding/decoding which would be useful for bigbox). I The iGPU is actually better at certain things than the nvidia gpu, simply because it's packaged right in the cpu and just faster to do. You can always change the bios setting back and disable it. Games and certain apps (like photoshop) will automatically choose the best GPU for their use. You will enable the iGPU, reboot to windows, then download the intel drivers, reboot again, then test. Applications and games (along with Windows helping) automatically choose the iGPU. I have mine enabled in my 8700 w/ my 970 for years and never had a reason or issue to disable it. As I said, I found it very useful for steamlink remote streaming without taking up some of my 970 gpu for streaming. I only have a HDMI cable plugged into the nvidia GPU, nothing on the motherboard GPU.

Since big box is based on Microsoft Xaml (WPF?), I think it would be more optimized for intel iGPU vs a nvidia GPU. I could always try disabling my iGPU and test to see if I get a slowdown like you, but it should be a quick test for you to do.

The random write speeds on your SSD are much lower than that bench, which is interesting (might be because of a lot of wear), but the read speeds matter more here. Since those are fine, I don't think the SSD is the issue. However my SSD is NVME and it's over 1500MB/s on reads, which does make a big difference on loading things.

I use colorfuldark with the 4k videos. Since you run 1080p, HD videos is what I would use. I also have Windows Defender as my AV. I didn't exlude the launchbox folder or disable real time protection, but you could try that. If you use a 3rd party AV, disable it and test (it could be that AV, many slow down a computer that it's really noticeable how much faster things are with it off)

I've since tried every single BigBox theme available and the lag really ONLY occurs with COLORFUL. I mean BigBox in general runs pretty slowly when going to the options menu and back to the platform lists, bur once I'm at the platform lists, everything runs super snappy in every theme except for COLORFUL.

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