For some time I've tried to investigate why my OpenGL applications use almost 100% of CPU. The apps usually were quite simple, but still, CPU was heavily loaded. As it appears, the reason was quite simple: I had a window message loop (in WinApi) which was not perfectly implemented.
So, how to lower the CPU consumption rate?
The original message loop:
while (true)
{
PeekMsg(...)
if (quit....) break;
if (msg)
handle message;
else
{
Render();
SwapBuffers()
}
}
Whenever there was no window message I rendered the scene.
In that way you have max frame rate - full speed of a game, but also 100% of cpu usage.
Solution Ideas
One of the first idea is to limit FPS by using VSync (Vertical synchronization) (via wglSwapIntervalEXT).
if (is_supported_extension_WGL_EXT_swap_control) {
wglSwapIntervalEXT(1);
}
I got 60 HZ limit, but still my application used 100% CPU... The reason: driver waits for vsync and does not return to main thread (or allows other threads to run).
Finally I got some clever solution: WaitableTimers. The whole idea came from: www.codeguru.com/forum/archive
while (true)
{
SetWaitableTimer(myTimer, desired_frame_duration, ...);
PeekMsg(...)
if (quit....) break;
if (msg)
handle message;
else
{
Render();
SwapBuffers();
}
WaitForSingleObject(myTimer);
}
In that way we limit loop to run at desired frame rate. It is working, and now I got around 15% CPU usage at 50 fps. I need to investigate that solution a bit more, but it is quite promising :)
todo: add final code here...
Other idea: use OpenGL queries to query something - meaning rendering is finished or vsync. It can work even better than those timers but implementation may be a bit complicated.