Screen Resolution

[BiggP]

Hi, I just have a general purpose sort of question for whoever is listening.  Having outgtown our Red Lion Controls Productivity Stations pretty poor resolution, to count weld cell production (5 years ago = 4 cells, now = 12 cells), I started looking around for the right alternative, without resorting to a second Red Lion setup.  720p for monitoring 12 cells is just too restrictive  - so I found this great piece of software (yes DAQFactory) which does what the PTV does so much better plus there so much more I could do and for lower TCO.  I recreated in 80 lines of code what took over 200 lines PER CELL on the PTV to pass part names, low and high production targets, parts per cycle snd more.  I mean 80 lines for all 12 not per cell so kudos. 

I digress, all I actually would like to know is anyone using DAQFactory outputting to 4K resolution or WUHD ultrawide format (5120x2160) and if so what GPU are you using please?

I've had to learn Modbus to communicate with our E3 i/o unit, had to push my lame coding ability way out of my comfort zone, have completed about 50% of project and still got 12 days trial to go, but gotta say this software is just the job, thanks

[AzeoTech]

Glad it is working for you.  I run a 4k monitor on my workstation and DAQFactory doesn't really have issue with it.  Really it will come down to how many screen components you have and how quickly you want the screen to refresh.  Fortunately, you'll see in the DAQFactory status bar there is "Page Draw" time displayed.  This will give you a good idea how much time DAQFactory is spending refreshing the screen, and therefore how quickly you can get it to regenerate.  Some components, like complex graphs, can take a fair bit of time, but it really depends.  I typically only see slow screen draws on significantly underpowered machines typically found is industrial panel PC's.  Then the trick is just to design the pages to make them less complex, which, truthfully, is often for the better anyway as it is easier for the operator to see the important information without the clutter.

Now, as to GPU, that doesn't really matter as long as it can actually drive the desired resolution.  As a 2D app, DAQFactory does not utilize any GPU features and does all its rendering on-CPU.  This may change as we improve the screen controls soon, but for now, it really is more important what your CPU speed is, especially since all the rendering is done in a single thread and so at least that part can't take advantage of multiple cores.  That said, the rest of DAQFactory absolutely can take advantage of multiple cores, its just the screen rendering that is stuck working with just one core at a time.

[BiggP]

Thanks for info, in all honesty there isn't a huge amount of complexity (yet) and the 50% i have done is the backend stuff mostly.  Current page draw time = 6ms but it not going to be running on my PC.  Thanks for the single thread tip, will make choosing suitable CPU easier.  While on the topic of hardware, is there any issues caused by amd/intel for cpu and amd/nvidia for gpu.  I only ask because all too often it is a thing

[AzeoTech]

Truthfully I wouldn't worry so much about the CPU.  Don't feel like you have to purchase a monster.  Any reasonable chip will be fine.  As I said, I usually only see slow refresh rates on industrial panels because they typically use CPU's that are low power and 10 years old.  And the slow refresh is pretty easy to work around.

There are no known issues with CPU or GPU brand.  I think the only real hardware issues we have had is with folks using low cost USB->Serial converters.