Graphics Card

[momentom]

How important is a fast video card with NT? I run 4Mb RAM and my video card uses some of that. Is it NOTICEABLY slowing down what I should see on my chart.

TIA

[NinjaTrader_Bertrand]

Hi momentom, no - most cards nowadays should do fine, there're all pretty much on par if you compare 2D performance, completely different story for games of course...of course if you have a solution that doesn't need to use main RAM it's a plus. I run 2 quads here one with 512 MB ATI card, and one more up to date with a 1 GB card > not noticing a difference for trading applications.

[claybuddy]

Slowness with Intel 4400 On board graphics or HDD or RAM or NT software?

I've been experiencing slowness using NT7 on a new laptop purchased late 2014.
Intel i7-4510U with Intel 4400 on board graphics and 16GB RAM, 1TB HDD

When I am doing longer term analysis on a weekly chart and load in a maximum amount of say 5111 bars, the Task Manager CPU goes up to maybe 37% on spikes moving and dragging around the chart with maybe 40 drawing objects on it. The Task manager GHz spikes from an idle 0.83GHz up to 2.70GHz when the chart is moved around or a new trend channel, Fibonacci, or text box, etc is drawn. Just one workspace, 1 chart.

It gets to the point where dragging or resizing is painfully slow - unusable.
I see this thread has gone stale, but I wish to know what exactly is the recommended hardware for Ninjatrader?
MSATA slot? 8GB or 16GB SSHDD? 8GB or 16GB RAM? 2GB or 4GB GPU or on-board graphics?

Is the slowness I am experiencing due to slow or no HDD, SSHDD, msata cache?
Or is it due to not having a dedicated GPU? The thread above states that Ninja is 2D and does not require a dedicated GPU. Also mentions that shared memory could be an issue, but even with 20 Chrome tabs, video player, Explorer windows, PDF viewers, etc, I never see more than 7.9GB of 16GB physical RAM used - so the on-board Intel 4400 should have plenty of RAM to use.

I had used the guidance in the above thread to purchase this computer and Ninjatrader is not performing in a usable manner. I have to go down to about 500 bars on a daily chart in order for the performance to be usable. But 500 bars on a weekly chart is intolerably slow.

I am frustrated because it takes quite a bit of time and effort to set up a computer with all the installation, Windows updates, licensing, etc.
I did not want to get into an arms race with all this computer hardware or keep buying and swapping computers to infinity. Is there actual hardware guidance for Ninjatrader doing longer term weekly analysis within charts?

Yes, one could get a 10 pound gaming laptop with dual graphics cards, 30 minutes of battery life, and overheating with loud fans for $4000 Fully Loaded and keep throwing hardware at the problem. But that kind of computer is not practical, portable or realistic in 2015.

And it is not a real solution to suggest buying and trying every high end laptop just to load NT onto it and see how it performs. Traders are using NT to analyze and trade, not run an IT support desk and benchmark every hardware combo out there. There should be some quantifiable guidance able to be given, no?

NT is a 2D application, so can the developer please determine exactly how much 2015 hardware should be purchased for doing longer term manual analysis so that NT remains usable? Document and give guidance as to what the bottlenecks are with using NT for

manual analysis vs. strategy robot
minute vs. daily / number of bars loaded
number of chart screens open
number of workspaces
any other factors that affect usability of NT for the user

Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Asus, Acer, Samsung? Models recommended?
HDD, SSHDD, msata, amount of RAM, GPU, GPU RAM, etc.?
FHD, WQHD, 4K?

Thank you.

[sledge]

How can they? 1 poorly written indicator can bring to a halt *any* system.

Woodies CCI is probably not poorly written - but for me in market replay - removing it - really speeds things a lot.


Is your HDD a 5400 rpm drive? Those are pretty slow compared to newer offerings.

[NinjaTrader_AlexC]

Hi claybuddy, thanks for your post.

Indeed, a dedicated GPU would have little effect on the performance of NinjaTrader. Your current hardware specs appear to be more than adequate to run NinjaTrader 7. I believe what you are running into is that NinjaTrader 7 is a single-threaded application - therefore, despite your multicore, multithreaded CPU, it is using only a single core of that. When you see CPU usage reach around 13% (100/8 cores, which is the number of cores that your i7 CPU is equipped with), a Not Responding state is going to occur while the one core that NinjaTrader runs in catches up with everything it needs to process. This would explain why performance is so slow when CPU usage reaches around 37% like you say.

NinjaTrader 8 will be multithreaded across all operations, so performance gains will be had when that is released. In the meantime, you can apply the following performance tweaks to your workspaces to free up your CPU:

Performance Tips

[claybuddy]

How can they? 1 poorly written indicator can bring to a halt *any* system.

Woodies CCI is probably not poorly written - but for me in market replay - removing it - really speeds things a lot.


Is your HDD a 5400 rpm drive? Those are pretty slow compared to newer offerings.

Even with no indicators on the chart the effect of loading in max data brings it to an unusable crawl. I thought of that which is why I brought it all down to 1 workspace, 1 chart. Even adding the 2 oscillators I do use back in does not change the user experience.

The suggestion about the 5400RPM drive demonstrates my point. Whether NT is running on a 7200 rpm, 5400 rpm, SSD, SSDHDD, or MSATA, the effects of a small set of usage patterns of users should be known. It should not be guess and install - and then upgrade hardware if you guessed wrong. What happens if we guess wrong again? Does that mean we keep buying laptops until we guess right? There is more than 1 laptop vendor and more than 1 HDD, memory, and GPU technology out there.

Perhaps a matrix document that shows "If you have a 1GB GPU and Quad core i5 over 2.0GHz and SSHDD then you can expect XYZ performance while doing QRY actions..."

I've seen such hardware to user experience matrixes on a few other software vendor websites that have computationally intense software, such as Adobe, TechSmith, etc.

[claybuddy]

The i7-4510U processor in this laptop is actually only 2 cores, 4 virtual cores it says.
The slowness comes in when I have more data in a chart window.

More specifically, for example, if I crunch the bars up with Ctrl + Up Arrow on a small window, it will bog down more than if I had a full screen maximized with the bars spread out with Ctrl + Down Arrow.

The extreme case of crawling comes if I do something like full screen, max weeks in the Ctrl + f popup, and max bars on the screen with Ctrl + Up arrow.

In this case, the CPU ramps up to as high as 2.93GHz, 37%, and the fans audibly go on.
As soon as I stop drawing or dragging the chart canvas around, the CPU goes down and fans go off a few seconds later.

Thank you for clearing up that a GPU will not address the problem. It is not possible to upgrade this (or most) laptops, so it would not be an easy fix.

Is this purely a computational problem then? Not a graphics rendering problem at all?

Does the Dual core i7 make a difference over the Quad core? Or because NT is single threaded, the CPU clock speed is the only thing that would potentially alleviate my usability issues?

[sledge]

There are issues with market replay and the # of trades (which draws objects) on charts.

There's a thread from a couple years ago that goes into this.My 2006 AMd dual core (4gb) couldn't get past 1 week or something with all the trades taking. Time was spent swapping memory. The original user could get a couple months before his would tank.

check this out:

http://www.ninjatrader.com/support/forum/showthread.php?t=52458&highlight=market+replay+slow

[NinjaTrader_AlexC]

Hi claybuddy, thanks for your reply.

This would be a computational problem, indeed. The dual core vs. the quad core i7 would not make a difference on NinjaTrader 7, though it would on NinjaTrader 8. Currently, the clock speed is indeed something that could be increased to yield performance benefits. However, if your slowdown occurs primarily when a huge amount of data is on the screen at once, it would also be recommended to reduce the amount of data being viewed at once where possible.