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Showing posts from 2017

Qt 5.10 Rendering Benchmarks

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Qt 5.10.0 RC packages are available now and actual release is happening pretty soon. So this seems to be a good time to run some rendering benchmarks with 5.10, including new QML Shape element, QQuickPaintedItem and QNanoPainter . After my previous blog post , some initial comments mentioned how QML Shape didn't reach their performance expectations. But I think that might be more of a "use the right tool for the job" -kind of thing. This demo application is very much designed to test the limits of how much heavily animated graphics can be drawn while keeping performance high and while having its own strengths, QML Shape likely isn't the tool for that. To prove this point, there is a new ' flower ' test case in QNanoPainter demo app which renders a nice flower path, animating gradient color & rotation (but not path). Combining it with new setting to render multiple items (not just multiple renders per item) and the outcome looks like this with 1 and 1

Qt 5.10 QML Shape testing

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When implementing component into QtQuick UI which needs something more than rectangles, images and texts, pure declarative QML hasn't been enough. Popular choices to use for items with some sort of vector drawing are QML Canvas , QQuickPaintedItem  or QNanoPainter . But with Qt 5.10 there will be supports for new Shape  element with paths that contain lines, quads, arcs etc. so I decided to install Qt 5.10 beta3 and implement all tests of "qnanopainter_vs_qpainter_demo" with also QML + Shape elements. ( This kinda makes it "qnanopainter_vs_qpainter_vs_qmlshape_demo" but not renaming now ). So here is in all glory the same UI implemented with QNanoPainter (left), QQuickPaintedItem (center), and QML+Shape (right): Hard to spot the differences right? If only there would be a way to prove this, some way to x-ray into these UIs... like QSG_VISUALIZE=overdraw  to visualize what Qt Quick Scene Graph Renderer sees? Here you can see that scene graph sees QNan

FitGraph NG UI prototype

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About a month ago I started exercising more, mostly jogging, weights and soccer (with kids). Target is to be in superb shape when 2018 starts, and I'm already feeling stronger & more energetic during the day so looking good! Anyway, this blog post is somewhat related to that. There's plenty of health-related apps and gadgets available these days and in the past I used some time pondering what would be a perfect activity tracking app for my needs. Now I decided to revive this earlier concept as 'FitGraph NG' while porting it to use QNanoPainter and polishing some parts. As usual, let's start with a video demonstrating the actual application: There would of course be more views available, this being just the 'activity timeline' part, but it would already cover many of my initial wishes: Showing the whole day as a graph, data or textually depending on needs. Automatic annotation of activities, type, duration and related activity data. And impo

Unity testing

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Couple weeks ago I decided to study a bit about Unity  as I haven't worked with it before. So implemented a simple "Rock Rolling in Terrain" game prototype as a case study, looking like this: By coincidence Marko also just made a nice blog post related to Unity , and thanks to standard assets his terrain even looks quite similar to mine so not going to repeat similar notes. But all in all my initial feeling is that Unity seems quite productive environment and wouldn't mind implementing some bigger project with it to get deeper.

QNanoPainter with Qt 5.8 (and QSGRenderNode)

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QNanoPainter  recently gained initial support for QSGRenderNode  which is a new public class available starting from Qt 5.8. What this means is that instead of rendering through FBO using QQuickFramebufferObject  so, OpenGL drawing is done directly into Qt Quick Scene Graph. And as a QQuickItem somewhere in the middle of scene, not just underlay/overlay for the scene which was already possible before Qt 5.8 using beforeRendering  & afterRendering . Below is a video running QNanoPainter tester app on MacBook Pro with 16 unique QQuickItems using QSGRenderNode mode: So should you enable QNANO_USE_RENDERNODE with your custom QNanoPainter items? There is a potential performance gain for not rendering through FBO. Especially if your UI contains many custom items and/or you resize items, QSGRenderNode may give more gains as FBO resizing can be costly. However, based on my testing with few different Android devices the performance difference seems pretty small, just few percent