This skin uses about 20% CPU on my Ryzen 7 2700X (eight core) processor.
This skin uses about 30% GPU on my Nvidia 1080ti.
The demonstration project is attached.
Observations:
- When only commenting out the empty string meter in the bottom of the skin ini, performance returns to normal.
- When only commenting out the image meters in the skin ini, performance returns to normal.
- This suggests image meter together with string meter is conflicting with each other somehow causing perhaps lots of redraws.
- Issue present in both latest final and beta versions of rainmeter now (4.3.1 Final Release - r3321 and 4.4 Beta Release - r3338)
- Hardware acceleration should be turned off, when it is enabled it will hide the issue mostly although total system gpu(not specifically rainmeter proces) usage for me was still about 14% whenever the skin was loaded, still very high. In any case it is weird when hardware accleration is off doing point 1 and 2 makes such a difference on performance.
Note that the specific image used in this skin is costing more performance than other images i have tried so far, but this just means it better illustrates the issue and makes it more obvious to debug.
During developing another skin that uses 10 images and string meters i encountered this issue first and noticed my skin was using 70% cpu and 80% gpu, giving my gaming rig a run for it's money. So this issue stacks up quickly and ramps up total utilization of your system quickly. I then stripped out everything down to the minimum to illustrate this issue and thus my static skin was made.
Turns out there was an invisible character in the skin ini file causing updates every millisecond instead of 1000. Thanks for everyone's help in investigating.
See posts below