If you appreciate this software and the immense amount of costly work that goes into it, and want it to continue, please buy a community membership with priority support by clicking on this link to our online shop at Digistore. If you are not in control of such funding decisions, please tell your PI about it. Psychtoolbox does not magically fund itself without help from its user community. December might be an especially good month to spend a little bit of leftover funds from the ending calendar year to make a small contribution for the benefit of all users. Thank you!
Psychtoolbox 3.0.18 Beta update “Ode to the slacktivists” SP2 was released at 2nd December 2021.
As usual, the complete development history can be found in our GitHub repository.
The release tag is “3.0.18.2”, with the full tree and commit logs under the URL:
https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/tree/3.0.18.2
This release is the result of over 170 work hours since the last release about a month ago. Substantial additional work was done “behind the curtains”, as pretty much during every release cycle, contributing to the underlying open-source eco-system for the benefit of not only users of Psychtoolbox, but also of other software like PsychoPy and others.
General
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Cleanups and refactoring, mostly irrelevant to end users.
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Various help text and documentation updates.
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Various improvements to demos and tests, done as part of the validation and compatibility work
for Matlab R2021b on Ubuntu 20.04.3-LTS, MS-Windows 10 21H1 and macOS 10.15.7 Catalina final.
Sponsored by Mathworks, thanks! (Neuroscience - MATLAB and Simulink Solutions - MATLAB & Simulink) -
New demo BasicSoundPhaseShiftDemo.m - Realtime phase-shifting of sine wave tones.
Linux
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Note that modern AMD Polaris graphics cards under Linux 5.14 with the latest AMDVLK v2021.Q4.1
AMD Vulkan driver now support 16 bpc framebuffers for native 12 bpc output. In principle this
would also work with earlier AMD Sea Islands and Volcanic Islands gpu’s, but needs a custom built
amdvlk driver, which we have available, but won’t provide for free. -
Some diagnostic improvements for pixel identity passthrough.
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Substantial improvements to NVidia Optimus laptop support when using the proprietary NVidia
OpenGL driver. “help HybridGraphics” for details. Laptops with Intel integrated graphics chips
and NVidia discrete gpu’s should work with proper timing and timestamping now on modern Linux
distributions like Ubuntu 20.04.3-LTS. AMD Ryzen integrated graphics + NVidia discrete gpu’s
should also work better wrt. quality and timing, although limitations wrt. performance exist with
AMD’s display driver and there might be unknown edge cases with broken visual stimulus onset
timestamping. I do have some (Linux kernel patch) solution for that, which provides excellent quality.
That solution is a hack though, and implementing a proper solution for the official Linux kernel
will take time to implement and get upstreamed, especially with the lack of proper funding. We
haven’t decided if and under what conditions we will provide the inofficial - hacky, but well working -
solution. The only sure thing is we won’t provide it for free.Please note that our general advice is to avoid hybrid graphics dual-gpu laptops. Single gpu
machines require less setup and have less potential for bugs and complications. Also, on
Windows, these dual-gpu laptops are pure trouble. These improvements for Linux are just
to lessen the impact of a bad purchase decision as far as this is possible.
macOS
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Switch supported and required Octave version to Octave 6.4. Octave 6.3 will likely continue to work.
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Try to detect if we are running on Apple silicon “M1 SoC” ARM - Macs with Apples proprietary
gpu. This will enable workarounds that allow Screen() to at least limp along, still with totally
broken visual stimulation timing and timestamping, but at least getting a picture onto the screen,
instead of complete failure. Also detect and report macOS variant and version, ie. Intel (supported)
or ARM M1 SoC (unsupported), macOS 10.15 (supported), macOS 11/12 (unsupported). -
Fix KbQueueCreate() crash if running in a single-threaded host runtime, iow.
octave-cli. More
importantly, this should avoid some keyboard queue crashes under macOS with some Python runtimes.
Ditto for Screen(). -
Note that MoltenVK 1.1.5 should be used for Vulkan on macOS.
Windows
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Switch supported and required Octave version to Octave 6.4. Octave 6.3 will likely continue to work.
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Try to detect Windows version more reliable. Report Windows 11 as officially unsupported/untested.
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Fix for Vulkan display backend for AMD graphics on Windows. Try to handle problems switching to
“fullscreen exclusive mode” better. Both the latest NVidia and AMD drivers have various bugs and
issues. We better try to work around them as good as we can, instead of just showing a black
screen. This is highly fragile under current Windows-10 due to poor graphics driver quality, and
may result in compromised presentation timing and timestamping. Luckily the only meaningful use
cases for Vulkan on Windows are HDR-10 display modes atm., so the damage is limited. Our guess
at the moment is that AMD driver versions older than 20.11.2 may work ok, ie. ones from before
November 2020. For people who want HDR display with proper timing, upgrading to AMD on Linux is
recommended.