Ho Ho Ho, the “Timely Twinkler” arrived in time before christmas, so you can visually stimulate your loved ones under the christmas tree with more fine-grained timing than ever before! This release follows the pattern of substantial visual stimulation timing improvements: It brings another bunch of cool improvements to VRR/FreeSync/G-Sync support on Linux.There are also a few minor improvements in other areas for the less fortunate ones who can’t enjoy Linux.
New features and improvements:
All operating systems:
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Adds PsychPhotodiode() driver for combining photo-diodes with sound cards for visual stimulus onset timestamping. Demonstrated in VRRTest.m as hwmeasurement=5 method.
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UpdatePsychtoolbox() will now resolve potential file conflicts automatically by forcing the updated files from the upstream server, simply overwriting/discarding user modifications.
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Documentation updates. Among other minor things, point to the new user forum at Discourse: https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group
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Improve ability to do reproducible builds for Python, contributed by Bernhard Wiedemann on behalf of openSUSE.
Linux:
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Ship basic set of MEX files for Octave 4.4 on Linux, e.g., for easy use with Octave on Ubuntu 19.10. Currently missing, to be part of a later update: Eyelink.mex, PsychCV.mex.
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Improved VRR support for fine-grained visual stimulus onset timing on Linux. The API has been reworked to allow for more future flexibility and future extensions without breaking backwards compatibility of user scripts. Most importantly, a more sophisticated multi-threaded VRR scheduler is now used, which should take hardware (gpu and display) and operating system/driver constraints into account to provide more precise and stable visual stimulus onset timing. Testing shows pretty good results on AMD FreeSync hardware, and some improvements on NVidia G-Sync hardware. AMD gpu’s and compatible “FreeSync” displays are strongly recommended over NVidia G-Sync for optimal current results and to take advantage of substantial improvements on Linux in the future.
Enjoy!