Engine Preferences

Engine Preferences

General preferences of SMODE's rendering engine. Add your Device External peripheral exchanging data with Smode Read More here: MIDI controller, OSC, Video and Audio devices etc.


The Engine section is divided into 9 sections described below:

General

For more information, please refer to the General Engine settings Full view of the Engine Read More page.

Video Outputs

For more information, please refer to the Video Output Device Video Output Devices are devices that enable the sending of a video stream out of Smode Read More page.

GPU Settings

The Smode output is defined by one non-movable graphics window without any border, that owns all Standard video outputs. Here are the different GPU settings you can edit:


Some computer can have multiple Graphics card of the same manufacturer. In the Graphics Card parameter, you can choose on which of them the computation is done. Prefer a powerful GPU here, even if you display your output on a less powerful GPU.
Vertical Synchronization (Vsync) allows the GPU to wait for the screen to be ready for the next picture to be displayed:
  • Active: the default value that waits for the next picture to be displayed
  • Adaptive (degraded mode): waits if possible, else tears the picture if the rendering is too slow
  • None (no vertical synchronization): GPUs can render images more quickly than the screen, resulting in a tearing effect. This mode is recommended for profiling purposes
  • Half (active vertical synchronization but with half screen refresh rate): Useful if your screen is 120Hz and a frame rate of 60 is sufficient, for instance
  • Quarter: Similar to the above option, but divides the screen refresh rate by four. These last two values can be interesting for saving battery energy or ensuring stability with slow frame rate content
Note that Half and Quarter synchronization modes may require disabling the 'Swap Exchange' Graphics Device Parameters optimization on some NVIDIA GPUs to avoid rendering glitches.
Enable output allows to Enable Output Enable/Disable Video Outputs Read More . There is a shortcut in the main Smode Toolbar or a keyboard shortcut [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Shift]+[W].
Graphics Device Parameters are advanced settings meant for editing in advanced projects only:
'Debug Context', 'Compatibility Profile' and 'Forward Compatible Profile' are settings for development or support purposes and should not be modified. 'Multi Sampling', 'Color/Alpha/Depth Bits' and 'Floating Point' allow you to manage default quality parameters for your output graphics windows, including color depth precision, aliasing, or floating point for HDR.
These values depend of your underlying hardware, for more than 8bit color depth or floating point quality, you need pro grade GPU like Quadro or FirePro. 'Swap Exchange' optimizes vertical synchronization, except for Half and Quarter mode on some GPUs.
Eject Mouse Cursor prevents your mouse cursor from being displayed over the output window.
Top Most prevents other application windows from being displayed on top of your output window.

Video Inputs

For more information, please refer to the Video Input Device Video Input Devices are used to capture video streams in Smode Read More page.

Control Devices

For more information, please refer to the Control Device Use any external controllers such as MIDI or OSC, DMX, and ArtNet Read More page.

Audio Input/Output

For more information, please refer to the Audio Device Use audio devices in Smode Read More page.

Clock Inputs

For more information, please refer to the Clock Device Used to synchronize an animation with Time Code Read More page.

Network

The Network section allows you to setup Smode Server.

"Run server" allows Smode clients to connect on this Smode instance for remote access or Session sharing.
"Address" allows you to change the default Smode Server listening port 5186 (useful to comply local network firewall settings)
Address Also allows to change the default listening IP of incoming connections from any IP (0.0.0.0) to a specific one. (useful when multiple network adapters on different subnets are in use, but not recommended when using DHCP)
"Disable Per Server Loading" active default, this allows Smode Project on an network session to unload all parts of Scene or Pipeline that are not connected to a Video Output in the Pipeline Define how video content is processed in a project Read More
This is useful to maintain performances on big project shared on several Smode computers in a network: only the concerned part of the Pipeline are rendered by each computer.
This can be disabled to allow the visualization of all the project on the same computer during design phase.
"Enable NDIRemote Viewport" this allows your Smode Server to compute the Viewport of remotely connected software and send this video signal inside an NDI pipe.
This default behavior can be disabled to maintain maximum performances during encoding phase.
"Detach From Session" experimental feature allows to avoid the current server to mirror its local change to the other server in the network. This can help during show encoding to work like if the network was offline temporarily.
Note that when On Air all local and network Viewports are mute for best performances.

See Also: