Animated icons sluggish - poor performance

from Stardock Forums

I'm using Objectdock 2.0, and I use animated icons with the "Animated Docklet" available through Wincustomize. I also use the nice animated icons from "Spiffy" that are available though Wincustomize and also Rocketdock's site.

 

But any animated icons from Spiffy barely work - even with "optimized for performance" selected in Objectdock. The icons are choppy and sluggish, barely moving from frame to frame. I have an I7 920 processor with 3gb memory so it should run fine. Animated icons form other users seem to run much much better, but "Spiffy" has very detailed and complex icons, and Stardock won't play nice with them. Even if I set the animation delay to 0, it still barley works at all. Often, the animation stops part way through and resets to the first frame, without completing the full animation.

 

If I use Rocketdock with those same icons, they play flawlessly, full speed. So why can't Objectdock handle those same icons?

 

objectdock
2,095 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top

first of all the skinner name is Spippy not "Spiffy" any way he started here on WC with the nick ForzaItalia !

I know he is very popular on the RD gallery, thanks to the link he is always providing to the Animated Shortcut docklet the same docklet is the most popular download on the WC library during the last months

... probably OD 1.9 was less complex and CPU consuming respect 0.D. 2.0, have a try with the previous version

as the Spippy animated icons are very much CPU resources consuming for the huge frames size and the total number ( in the past I gave to him some advices but it seems with no use)

...  try to use not more than 1 animated icon at the time !

... with the animation delay set to 0 you should have only 1 still frame ( I never tried)

hope this helps, let me know ! ;)

 

 

 

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

Hey thanks for the reply.

 

Oops - I meant Spippy. :typo:

 

Yeah I get the feeling it is those large animations that's taking up resources within Objectdock. As an experiment, I loaded all of the Spippy Icons into Photoshop and resized them to 50%. Now they work perfectly in Objectdock and still look fantastic. There is no visible quality loss that I can see and I'm picky about those things. So there's the solution if anybody else is curious about this.

 

Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Glad to have gave you the inspiration for the solution (huge frame size !)