MADRIX Forum

Just some hints for running madrix on small / slow / weak computers - be it a backup machine or for small (DMX) setups. Also on "normal" setups this might be of interest in order to save energy.

If this topic has been covered somewhere already or from developers point of view something is wrong please let me know.

- audio seems to be the hardest task, so turn of the Audio button (unfortunately the Audio input might be the main reason for running madrix...)
- if you can work with just one storage, disable the other storage's preview
- close both DVI previews
- lower the preview frame rate to about 25fps
- lowering the audio performance from default "3" did not change much here, but increasing it will increase CPU load a lot
- the audio driver (WDM or Asio) might have an influence but you need to find out yourself

(any more hints appreciated)

decrease the MainMix FPS form 50 to 25 for example.

ok, thanks - this seems to have a little influence as well.

Just to give an example, I "successfully" tried a very old laptop as backup machine: AMD AthlonXP 1600 (single core) with 512MB Ram, WinXP

This works with about 80% CPU load for a complete DMX universe, audio analysis with ASIO USB driver, Artnet in+out (dmx remote), but only one storage preview (enabling the second would drive the CPU constantly at 100%).

I've used a laptop with Atom 1.6ghz CPU and 1Gb Ram with Madrix in standalone mode (only pre-programmed cues) with all Previews off, driving about 8 Universes worth of pixels without any troubles.


Apart from the Madrix tweaking, I find that performance can be improved even more by disabling all Windows features that you don't need: anti-virus, firewall, printer spooler, network cards, remote logon, etc, and any program/service that resides in memory (by doing msconfig and disabling all in the startup tab). And if you really want to scrape the last bits of power, you can even close the Explorer.exe service and launch Madrix from the Taskmanager...


Also, most Windows laptops by default have the "Balanced Power Plan" set, so you can change it to "High-Performance".