Blender with Skype framerate drop

Hi,

i just noticed that (on Windows 8.1) whenever i display Skype window on second monitor, my blender viewport framerate becomes a lot less smooth and lot more stuttering. As soon as i minimize Skype, framerate goes back to extremely smooth.

Is there any way of solving this? I think both pieces of software may be using same drawing system, making them somehow interfere with eachother.

What’s your specs,your PC might be having trouble coping.

CPU is i7 870, GPU is GTX660Ti, 16GB RAM. OS is Windows 8.1. There are really no performance issues as long as skype window is minimized, so aside from GPU vendor, i don’t think it’s anything hardware related. It’s most probably Blender using same thing Skype uses to draw UI.

You can try setting Skype to use only one cpu core:

  1. open Task manager
  2. go to processes
  3. find Skype.exe
  4. right click and chose “Set Affinity”
  5. untick all cores but one.

Another thing you can try is enabling VBOs in blender.

  1. go to file and then user preferences
  2. under “system” tick VPOs

Hope this helps

I am using both VBOs, and CPU usage is definitely not a problem. As i said, it’s something wrong with window manager. They both seem to use same and steal hardware acceleration one from another.

Just chiming in to mention that I am running into something similar with Google Hangouts. I had a session yesterday and the framerate in the Blender viewport went from 30fps down to 13fps as soon as the Hangout was running. Blender and the Hangout window were running on different screens of a 3-monitor setup, and I was streaming out the screen on which Blender was running.

The scene on display contained a few sculpted elements, some Subsurf models, and a number of lowpoly models. Displaying a much lighter scene (from the same .blend, but just with a few lowpoly models being actually visible) caused the same kind of framerate drop.

I noticed that the framerate went back up for a bit when I switched the viewport to orthographic, but the drop in performance came back quickly after.

I hope this helps !

I guess if you can tell skype not to use 3d accelerator this should fix it or check gfx settings if you could optimize performance for dual screen, nvidia has such an option. It´s a common problem with other 3d apps too, not only skype and blender.

Try using a RHUBweb conferencing server and check if it resolves your issue.