Fixed Grid - Performance Issues

[reach4thelasers]

I prefer all my charts to have a fixed grid of 50 Ticks, as it gives me perspective. My 5m, 60m and Daily charts look like (attached).

Ninjatrader has a performance issue related to large numbers of visible grid lines. When I have a daily chart maximised at 4K resolution with 50 Tick Grid lines, the chart is unusable. To the point that it will barely scroll and is impossible to draw on. Switching the grid lines to automatic resolves it.

[NinjaTrader_JustinS]

Hello,

Thank you for your post.

I'm currently attempting to replicate the issue but have been unable to do so.

I do see that there is an additional tool bar in the top left hand corner of your chart, have you attempted to replicate the same without this item loaded in?

You mentioned specifically that this happens on your 4k resolution monitor. Does the issue occur on a monitor with reduced resolution?

I look forward to your reply.

[reach4thelasers]

Hey Justin,

Try opening GBPAUD Weekly Chart, 1000 bars. Fixed Grid lines set to 1 Tick. It performs badly for me even in a small minimized window.

Cheers,

Kevin

[NinjaTrader_JustinS]

Hello,

Thanks for your reply.

I tried as you suggested and even compressed the price scale so that more grid lines were shown within the visible field. Unfortunately we are not seeing a drop in performance.

I would like to look into your log and trace files to find any indication of what is occurring.

You can send this by going to the Control Center-> Help-> Mail to Platform Support.

Ensuring 'Log and Trace Files' is checked will include these files. This is checked by default.

Please reference the forum URL in your message so we may link these together.

http://ninjatrader.com/support/forum/showthread.php?t=100556

[reach4thelasers]

Hey Justin,

I've removed all indicators and addons and it still performs badly. Does anyone there have a 4K screen? If so, try it on that - remember to turn off the scaling so that its actually rendering at full 4K.

[NinjaTrader_JustinS]

Hello,

Thank you for your reply.

As you say the difficulty here unfortunately is that we are not able to test identically to how you are doing so. However this is due to the fact that NinjaTrader does not specifically support 4k resolution monitors.

I have double checked to verify this, which is also why I wanted to know if it worked fine on a Non-4k monitor so we could be certain this does not affect you otherwise.
It is not that the platform is completely unusable with a 4k monitor but may become unstable when certain graphical effects are displayed.

Do you have a non 4k monitor this can be tested on?

[reach4thelasers]

Hey Justin,

its definitely the resolution, if I reduce the size of the window its fine. And by the way... Ninjatrader DOES support 4K resolution - everything else works great. However, despite static horizontal lines being one of the easiest artifacts to render; Ninjatrader struggles with the chart grid lines. The only thing easier to render than a static horizontal line is a single pixel! Since a horizontal line is simply a single pixel expanded to the full width of the axis. So it should not cause performance issues.... Something isn't right here...

At a stab in the dark... I would say these static lines are being needlessly re-rendered to the chart's visible area (X, X+W) every time the window is scrolled . With all the deadlocking and crashing related to rendering; static horizontal lines is the last thing the rendering engine should be spending time re-rendering. I'd strongly recommend you get someone to look into it, I think if the cause gets found it will take a lot of load off the rendering engine.


Cheers,,

Kevin

[eDanny]

You do know that everything in the chart has to be re-rendered/redrawn on any event including scrolling, tick updates, resizing, etc. I hope.

[reach4thelasers]

That would be a silly way to do things, don't you think?

If I draw 100 horizontal lines whose geometry goes from the visible screen area say (300:900) on the X-Axis and fixed intervals on the Y-axis.... and then I scroll the screen 20 pixels .... and instruct SharpDX to to draw ANOTHER 100 horizontal lines at the new screen area X: (320:920) everything needs to be re-rendered. The geometry primitives from the old lines are ejected from the GPU, new ones are calculated and put in place and the the screen is repainted.

Conversely, If I draw 100 horizontal lines from NegativeInfinity to PositiveInfinity, and then I scroll the screen, then the geometry of those lines has not changed, re-rendering is not required, the old Primitives in the Graphics card are still valid therefore, they don't need to be re-rendered and replaced. The graphics card simply re-paints the screen using its already-computed cached internal geometry primitives.

Re-rendering is not the same as re-painting.

You actually cause more work by re-drawing horizontal lines to the visible screen area rather than the full width of the axis; you're trying to optimize but actually slowing everything down. Someone else has already thought about how to make these things efficient; the graphics card and the rendering library are very good at what they do.

To quote the eminent Computer Scientist C.A.R Hoare:

[jcrza]

The community has been chasing them around about this forever. It took me a while to figure out it was tied to one or more high resolution monitors.

They seem to be surprised and unable to reproduce the issue every time it's brought up. Isn't it crazy that by now, in all this time, not one person in their office has acquired a 4k screen or multiple screens with higher resolutions (ultrawide) that bring out these issues so they can test them?

I had to stop using NT8 for charting because of it.

I'm absolutely certain one competent programmer, given instruction to fix this issue, and pointed in the right direction, could do so. I wish they'd acknowledge that they either have no plans to support adequate performance on one or more monitors above 1080p or say they're working to fix it.

[reach4thelasers]

I agree jcrza. That's what I've been saying... just needs someone to look into it. Static horizontal lines should not cause performance issues; there is a problem with how these have been implemented.

[reach4thelasers]

Here's a video I made which demonstrates the problem:

https://1drv.ms/f/s!Ajlj7dTld4OYgcpleghp19qo2_PSvg

[NinjaTrader_JustinS]

Hello,

Thank you for your posts.

We would like to gather a bit of information to verify why you are seeing this behavior.

What are you PC specifications? Primarily, what video card are you currently using?

As eDanny mentioned the chart has to be re-rendered/redrawn on basically any moment and using a 4k resolution is going to stress the system far more as there is 4 times as much visual processing that has to happen.

This as you can probably imagine could potentially lead to a drop in performance.

Please let us know what you are working with so we may get a better idea.

[reach4thelasers]

Intel Core i7-6700HQ 2.60GHz 32GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M
7680x2160 across two screens.

My hardware can handle Ninjatrader at 4K resolution. Lots of indicators, lots of bars visible. Throw too many static-horizontal grid-lines into the mix and it grinds to a halt.

And as I said in a previous post, re-painting is not the same as re-rendering; of course I'm assuming that you're using SharpDX Hardware Acceleration and its not switched-off for some reason....

[jcrza]

I'm using a GTX 1070 and a hex core i7-5820k watercooling OC'd to 4.7GHz. I had these problems with one ultrawide and one 1080p monitor, which is really not much screen real-estate.

It's a candlestick chart, it should be performant at 4k on integrated graphics. I just don't get it. I can even play games at high detail while using NT8 but if I then go to interact with a chart with too much data on it or whatever everything grinds to a halt. It's obviously creating unnecessary workloads to accomplish what it's doing when resizing/scrolling/navigating.