# OSX: Much faster MakeTexture / DrawTexture available for testing... **URL:** \ **Category:** Uncategorized\ **Created:** [January 5, 2005, 7:13am UTC](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/osx-much-faster-maketexture-drawtexture-available-for-testing/948 "2005-01-05T07:13:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Allen\_Ingling](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a183cd/32.png) [@Allen\_Ingling](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/u/Allen_Ingling)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2005, 7:13am UTC](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/osx-much-faster-maketexture-drawtexture-available-for-testing/948/1 "2005-01-05T07:13:23Z")
Hello everybody, Allen, Jan and Lisa, if you are not happy with the current speed of Screen('MakeTexture') and Screen('DrawTexture') in PTB OS-X 1.0.40, please read on. In all other cases: Sorry for spamming ;) At a boring sunday afternoon i had a look at the Sourcecode of OS-X Psychtoolbox Release 1.0.40. I had some ideas on how to improve the speed of the Screen('MakeTexture') and Screen('DrawTexture') commands, implemented and tested it and first results look good to me: Depending on the size and format of the image matrix (Double matrix or uint8 matrix, Luminance image, Luminance+Alpha image, RGB image or RGB+Alpha image) the new MakeTexture - implementation is between 3 and 10 times faster than the one currently contained in PTB 1.0.40. e.g., a 800 x 800 pixels uint 8 grayscale image takes 3 Milliseconds to process compared to 36 ms in the standard implementation, a 800 x 800 pixels double RGB+Transparency image takes 78 ms compared to 207 ms in the standard implementation... The speed of DrawTexture is also more consistent: For images whose width is divisable by 8, my implementation is about 10-20% slower, but for all other image sizes its between 2 and 3 times faster. A few small bugs have also been fixed... This code has been extensively tested and benchmarked with a wide variety of texture formats, but only on a single machine, a Single processor PowerMac G5 1.6 Ghz, 256 MB RAM, NVidia GeForce graphics card with 64MB VRAM on MacOS-X 10.3.7. Now, i need some volunteers for testing the code on other machines, especially ones with more RAM memory, ATI-Radeon graphics cards and G4 processors to see if it is consistently faster and bug-free(TM), or if it needs more work. My goal/hope is obviously that Allen Ingling integrates the new implementation in one of the next Psychtoolbox releases. Please find a Zip file with all the necessary files (A Readme file, the new Screen.mexmac file, the Source code of the modified routines and some Benchmarkscripts and Demos) on our FTP-Server under: ftp://ftp.tuebingen.mpg.de/kyb/kleinerm/FastPTBScreen.zip You need to replace the Screen.mexmac file in your PTB Folder with the file in the ZIP file to test. Please also test it with your experiment code for some real-world testing additionaly to the benchmark script. Please report success/failure either to the Psychtoolbox-Forum and/or to me ( mario.kleiner at tuebingen.mpg.de ) An explanation of what has been changed in the code can be found in the .c source files in code comments that are prefixed with "MK:", but basically it boils down to some texture rotation trick and optimizations of the C code of MakeTexture... I've also got a few more ideas for further improvements of the performance of DrawTexture / MakeTexture, but first this code needs to be successfully tested / integrated. If you've got questions regarding this thingy, feel free to e-mail me. Happy new year & happy testing :-) -mario -- \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* Mario Kleiner Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics Spemannstr. 38 72076 Tuebingen Germany e-mail: [mario.kleiner@...](mailto:mario.kleiner@...) office: +49 (0)7071/601-742 fax: +49 (0)7071/601-616 www: [http://www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/~kleinerm](http://www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/~kleinerm) \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan