You guys got me to do more work....
Here is the test I ran and the results....
The test was performed by using a tutorial score from VSL website, specfically the E.T. Score, but you can perform the the test at home with any project you like. I basically ran the following command during the same 3 minutes of playback for the score I chose.
[code]iostat -w 3 -I -c 60 | awk '$1 !~ /^disk/ && $1 !~ /^KB/ { print $10 }'[/code]
That looks at average user CPU% every 3 seconds and spits out 60 samples over a 3 minute period.
So what are the results? You can see a more complete collection of the data here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H40bkgaJ0F7VDcjhQvZlUEqCARCVLb_b/view?usp=sharing
But to summarize as average CPU% over 3mins period:
Vep6 minimized Retina display: 38.82%
Vep6 Minimized Non-Retina: 38.12%
Vep6 Active Retina Display: 51.62%
Vep6 Active non-Retina: 49.37%
Vep7 Minimized Retina: 39.12%
Vep7 Minimized Non-Retina: 38.10%
Vep7 Active Retina: 57.93%
Vep7 Active Non-Retina: 47.93%
Summary
- The VEP gui on both VEP6 and VEP7 takes significant CPU overhead for whatever its doing when its not minimized.
- With the VEP gui minimized, VEP6 is slightly more efficient then VEP7 but by less then 0.5%, which is statistically irrelevant.
- With the gui Active in non-Retina mode, VEP7 is slightly more efficient then VEP6 by a factor of 1.5% difference, which is also somewhat insignificant.
- With gui active in Retina/HiDPi mode, VEP7 is less efficient then VEP6 by a factor of 6%, which is somewhat significant.
Overall I think the fact that VEP needs 10-20% of CPU just to display the GUI is concerning, apparantly this was the case on VEP6 as well. VEP7 appears to be slightly more efficient in the GUI in non-retina, but signficantly worse with Retina display. The above is on my system, which is MacPro 5,1 12x3.33 ghz cores, 128GB ram. Metal-capable display adapter. Nothing else running during the tests.