[xayide]

I had a look at this and this is what software does.....with x264, 1080p movie using 1440x900 retina mode. Do not sync to display or vertical sync.

Kodi 16: CPU usage is 50-90% with about 10-11 watts power usage, kodi cpu of total system is 16-19%
Kodi 17: CPU usage is 180-230% with about 20-21 watts power usage, kodi cpu of total system is 50-60%


This is with TOP in a terminalwindow. So on a macbook with 2 cores 4 threads I guess 400% is max. The last cpu usage is taken from istatbar where 100% is all four threads used so 50-60% means one core maxed ans some used on the second. I guess powerusage says a lot.

[FernetMenta]

@xayide, could you compare v16 and v17 when just having RSS feed active on the home screen?

[xayide]

@FernetMenta

Ofcourse, here it is:

kodi 16. 0,7% 21,74%
kodi 17: 25% 31,25%

This is with HW accell on. Both showing 59,97/60fps....
The first value is taken from the macos taskmanager/istatbar, second % is from kodi DEBUG OSD shown as "KODI-CPU"
Seems Kodi 16 is pausing rendering when you change desktop while kodi 17 runs up. I can clearly see it rising when I switch betwean desktos.before it got time to ramp up.

[FernetMenta]

Thanks very much.
So looks like the root cause has ever been around and the symptoms show more clearly now. 20% CPU in idle is much too high.

I think the problem is that the render thread does a busy wait while waiting for the display to be refreshed and the buffers swapped. On a quick search I found this: https://developer.apple.com/library/cont...index.html
Definitely not how Kodi does it. The proper fix will come when the main and render thread will be split some time in the future. Not sure how to alleviate the symptoms for the short term. Somehow the main thread has to be synchronised with vblank.

[xayide]

Thanks for taking the time to investigate.