ASI 120 MC framerate to slow?

[Corpze]

Hi, i bought a ASI 120 MC and starting to get around things together with my PST, but i can´t get any higher FPS than around 8-10... is it my PC that i to slow?

The computer is a Asus eee 1225b:

AMD® APU E450 1.65GHz (dual core)

4gb DDR3

[ronin]

Seems something is wrong as the 120 appears to be specified as 35 fps at the slowest, I assume that this is the problem area. Would have thought that a 1.65Ghz processor and 4Gb were sufficent.

At some time I recall someone posting additional instructions concerning the software and setting it up. There was one area that was heavily indocated but cannot recall exactly what it concerned. I had thought that this was on the ZWO site but maybe not. There is a forum on the ZWO site that appears to be useful - join and post a question there.

Is the comms port USB2, there appears to be problems with USB3.

Can you check the status of the USB port?

At this time unless one of the few people that have a ASI 120 camera comes along I would suggest the ZWO forum.

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Is your USB port USB2.0 or perhaps USB1.1? That makes a big difference in top speed. I have the 130MM and it works fine on my old machine (8 years old VAIO SZ31), even reaching over 28 fps at 1280x1024, so very close to the 30fps limit.

Another point to watch is the exposure time. If that is set at 0.1s, the frame rate must drop to less than 10fps (for obvious reasons.

[Merlin66]

User's in Oz seem to be getting frame rates of 40+ at 1024 x 600.....

http://solarchat.solarastronomy.org/index.php/en/this-is-solar-chat/6-this-is-solarchat-/73329-first-light-asi120mmpst-19th-june

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

My 130MM will go up to 60fps quite readily at 640x480 (which I use for planetary)

[Corpze]

The PC only has two USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0 so i guess i should worry about the ports beeing to slow, the USB 3.0 isn't working reliable together with the camera and fire capture, hope that will change in the future.

How do i check USB-status? it won't go higher than 10fps with lower resulotion or/and minimal exporuser time either... but autostackert takes about 12hrs to stack 600 frames to so AMD isn't the best processor either :/

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Stacking 600 frames takes several minutes on my ancient core duo machine (not even core 2 duo). AMD processors might be slow, but 600 frames in 12hrs suggests there is something seriously wrong. Are there other processes eating up CPU time (virus scanners are a prime candidate). Everything runs so much faster on my home desktop (Core 2 Quad) since I rid myself of Symantec's garbage (that is HARD). Its virus scanner brought this quad core to a crawl. AVG is much better in that respect

[ronin]

The ZW forum talks about troubles with USB3. So I would avoid using that connection.

Sounds like something is wrong on the PC, as Michael says disable the virus checker, I had one once that slowed every thing so much I could not get in with Windows running to shut down the Anti Virus, think I spent half a day removing the virus checker that time. I set the AV to run on demand not all the time. They are pretty stupid and check every file that is opened, that seems at times to include themselves.

Check the running processes and applications, on mine I keep finding "plugin-container.exe" running and chewing through a fair amount of processing power, it is running an animation in a frame, so it irrelevant.

I also use the Wise disk cleaner and registery cleaner, seem OK for me and my PC. First time it runs is a bit scary as there are lots of identified items it wants to kill off. Not sure what OS it works on so check.

[Corpze]

Well, first thing first, i don´t use the USB 3.0 ports so i "can't" be that... i have no antivirus, running win7 64b with 60 processes running, the process that chews up the most is svchost at 0-7% cpu and around 100mb of ram, but i also run the computer remote, witch takes some power (0-2% cpu and 70mb ram) but i don´t think that this should be the problem.... nothing seems to be wrong, yet it is :S

[Oddsocks]

HI Corpze,

All indications are that the laptop is not running at full speed, stacking 600 frames shouldn't take more than a few minutes.

A few things to try are.

1. Run the windows benchmark tool built into Win 7 and see what score is given for CPU and RAM.

2. Check power settings, try capturing or stacking with power connected, laptop may be on economy mode when running off battery.

3. Download and run a benchmarking software package like NovaBench or SisSoftware Sandra, this may flag up slow CPU/RAM/Bus etc.

4. With the camera connected check in Device Manager that all drivers have been correctly loaded for the motherboard and camera, there should be no exclamation marks <!> against any device

5. Check BIOS, note down current BIOS settings and then load default BIOS, reboot and try camera again to see if speed has increased, if not or if laptop is unstable return BIOS to original settings.

6. Check the CPU fan is running and air flow is not blocked, the CPU will only run at 10% of full speed if temperature is too high.

7. Disable remote and run the laptop direct, although remote should not slow the CPU the Windows Remote Desktop function can cause issues, I had noticed it slows my observatory laptop by 50% and at present I am not using it.

Regards,

William

[Corpze]

I Will try that William, but i tried to uncheck the "debayering" button in firecapture and now i get 30 FPS at full res. But am i recording in color without debayering?

[Corpze]

Ok, i run the win 7 classification test and got average 3.7 from a scale from 1-7,9

CPU: 3,7

RAM: 5,6

HDD: 5,9

Powersettings are at high performance all the time, even with battery.

All drivers are loaded as they should, latest drivers installed.

the fan works as it should and the processors (both kernels) runs av 100% when i benchmark.

I will download the benchmarks program and try that to.

No change at all with VNC disabled either...the pc is quick in all the other programs (loading chrome in 1 sec, open office in 5 sec etc.)

I have reaelly no idea what this can be

[Oddsocks]

Hi Corpze,

As you have found, you should not have the "Debayer" box checked, this should only be used on high performance desktop/laptop machines as it is a processor hungry tool.

When you capture with the "Debayer" box unchecked you are still capturing colour data in the Y800 format but the colour data is not decoded at the time of capture, simply stored with each frame.

Use the "Debayer Tool" in Firecapture after capture to convert the image file into full colour.

The only other tool in Firecapture that you need to check is in the "Performance" tab, try selecting the option "Direct disk write without OS caching" to write your capture file direct to disk, this is sometimes necessary on lower performance laptops/desktops, if this makes a big difference then leave it set to "Direct disk write" if the acquisition speed only changes slightly then run the "Test Optimal Disk Buffer" tool on the same page and then set the recommended disk buffer size using the drop down tab above. I suspect the "Direct Disk Write without OS caching" will give you the fastest acquisition speed possible.

From your Win 7 classification test I can see that the CPU in your laptop is the bottleneck for image processing "on the fly" and this is slowing your capture speeds so you need to configure Firecapture to capture data with as little real time processing as possible and carry out the colour conversion afterwards.

Your HDD disk and RAM scores are average to good, again indicating that "direct disk write without OS caching" should give good capture frame rates.

You don't need to run any more benchmarking tests, the Win 7 tool has told you enough.

I did not think the AMD processor was quite so slow but have to say I only have experience with the Intel Core i3 where I get a CPU score on my MSI laptop of 5.5.

For me, I have found that I am most comfortable only capturing data with my laptop, I then transfer the data to my desktop iMac via hardwired Gigalink and carry out stacking and processing on the iMac (using virtual Windows Xp running on Parallels Desktop) as my iMac is at least twenty times faster than the MSI laptop.

I think the biggest gains for you in camera acquisition speed will be by "tweaking" the Firecapture settings.

The web page here has some useful information to help get the best from Firecapture software

http://firecapture.w...p/settings.html

I hope this may be of help...

Regards,

William.

[Corpze]

Thank you so much for the help, i have read through the firecapture manual à second time and is now somewhat clearer when i have fiddled with the program for a week :-)

Do you think thats why it takes almost 12hrs to stack 600 frames with autostakkert to?

[Oddsocks]

Hi Corpze,

Glad you are making some progress...

I'm not sure why Autostakkert is taking so long, I downloaded and tried Autostakkert when it first appeared but found I had better final results using Registax so I gave up on Autostakkert.

I know Autostakkert has been revised since I last tried it but I guess I'm getting a little lazy these days and prefer to stick with what I know works for me.

It might be an idea for you to download Registax, it is free software, and try stacking your 600 frames again in Registax, this will at least tell you if the slowness is down to laptop hardware or something peculiar to Autostakkert?

Regards,

William.

[Corpze]

I actually tried registax 6 before autostakkert and indeed that was much quicker, about 20 mins for 600 frames, but it didnt align properly, just got a blurry image (even after wavelets) but i guess i can fiddle a bit more with it

[Merlin66]

I find at times that Registax 6 isn't as good as Registax5!!

When pain persists, try Registax 5 instead....

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

I find at times that Registax 6 isn't as good as Registax5!!

When pain persists, try Registax 5 instead....

Agreed, I have both installed on my machine (AND AS!2)

[Corpze]

Ok, i have spent a good sized cup of coffee here in the midsommers morning before my mistress has woken up and actually got the prominence avi fairly good stacked with registax 6 and the 150/600 frames took about 5 minutes to stack! might settle to registax instead of AS2!

I think my Asus Eee AMD and autostakkert just isn't made for each other

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

This problem may well be due to the way AS!2 has been optimized. If you optimize for powerful CPUs with large cache sizes you may end up creating a heavily sub-optimal program for a smaller CPU and in particular for smaller cache sizes. Cache memory has quite a power drain, so these are often reduced to get battery life on mobile devices. My old Core Duo has quite a bit of L2 cache, so it fares quite well on AS!2. AS!2 also automatically uses multiple cores, and this also influences performance, again as a function of cache size, and cache architecture (shared cache for multiple CPUs or discrete cache per CPU makes a difference in how you should optimize). Ideally, you want the source code and compile with optimizer setting for your machine.

[Oddsocks]

Hi Corpze,

It seems you have made some progress and there is not much else now that I can add so I will make this my last post.

I did find the attached document, screen shot from the ASUS instruction manual below (Swedish language).

It seems you can set power and speed both in Windows and at ASUS host and there is a "Super Performance" setting possible (but at a lower screen resolution i think?).

If this available on your machine it might give you a slight speed increase with AS!2.

Regards,

William.

1225b Super Hybrid Engine.tiff

[Corpze]

Thanks, i will check that up!