Installed at last, but unusable :-(

Software vkdt
1

I managed to get vkdt running (at last!) on a HP ProDesk 400 G5 MT, that means:

: CachyOS Linux
KDE-Plasma-Version: 6.7.3
KDE-Frameworks-Version: 6.28.0
Qt-Version: 6.11.1
: 7.1.5-1-cachyos (64-bit)
: Wayland
: 6 × Intel® Core™ i5-8500 CPU @ 3.00GHz
: 8 GiB (7,6 GiB nutzbar)
: Intel® UHD Graphics 630
: HP
: HP ProDesk 400 G5 MT
: SBKPF

This makes me happy, because it is the first time and the first machine I got in running. No chance on some other systems.

But there seems to be a problem with it, and maybe you can tell me, if this computer is just too old…

vkdt does not seem to be responsive to “me”, my mouse and keyboard. The best example is the module “grade 01”, where it is impossible to change anything. You have the four wheels and the settings for “lift”, “gamma”, “gain” and “offset”. They react when I hammer, drag and click a thousand times, but not predictable in any way, it is not responsive. I can’t drag the controllers. They move, but not predictable or controllable. It feels like a very long delay with unpredictable result. It is most of the times also impossible to reset a controller with double-clicking. A few times this worked.

I was able to change values in the “.cfg”-file of the image in

param:grade:01:lift:0:0:0:0
param:grade:01:gamma:1:1:1:0
param:grade:01:gain:1:1:1:0
param:grade:01:offset:0:0:0:0
param:grade:01:mode:0

so the software seems to work as expected in some way.
I read some things about this and so I changed the value in

intgui/frame_limiter:60

to 60, and I found an advice to look at vkdt -d qvk

[gui] vkdt 1.0.99-457-gd166d053 (c) 2020–2026 johannes hanika
[gui] glfwGetVersionString() : 3.5.1 Wayland X11 GLX Null EGL OSMesa monotonic shared
[gui] vk extension required by GLFW:
[gui] VK_KHR_surface
[gui] VK_KHR_wayland_surface
[qvk] validation layer: Copying old device 0 into new device 0
[qvk] validation layer: Copying old device 0 into new device 0
[qvk] validation layer: Copying old device 0 into new device 0
[qvk] dev 0: vendorid 0x8086
[qvk] dev 0: Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630 (CFL GT2)
[qvk] max number of allocations -1
[qvk] max image allocation size 16384 x 16384
[qvk] max uniform buffer range 134217728
[qvk] num queue families: 1
[qvk] picked device 0 without ray tracing and without float atomics and without coopmat support
[qvk] queue 0 is idx 0 family 0
[qvk] using A2R10G10B10_UNORM_PACK32 and colour space sRGB nonlinear
[qvk] hdr disallowed in config file, set intgui/allowhdr:1 to enable
[qvk] vulkan present mode: FIFO (vsync)
[gui] no gamepad found
[gui] no display profile file display.DP-1, using sRGB!
[gui] [menu] loaded 2 entries for ‘lighttable’
[gui] [menu] loaded 70 entries for ‘darkroom’
[gui] [menu] loaded 2 entries for ‘nodes’
[gui] [menu] loaded 0 entries for ‘files’
[qvk] using A2R10G10B10_UNORM_PACK32 and colour space sRGB nonlinear
[qvk] hdr disallowed in config file, set intgui/allowhdr:1 to enable
[qvk] vulkan present mode: FIFO (vsync)

but I have to admit, that I don’t understand… :slight_smile:

I would be happy if someone would just tell me that I can stop researching because it’s just my hardware that’s too slow. I would not have problems using it slow, if I would just be able to drag and reset controllers. What do you think?

2

The GPU defines vkdt’s speed, but yours seems to be on the very slow slide. You might try reducing level of detail (open an image in darkroom → esoteric / settings), maybe this helps a bit.

2 Likes
4

Unfortunately your gpu seems to only expose one vulkan queue so you do not benefit from running compute asynchronously from the gui, and thus the gui basically needs to wait for the graph to finish computing before it updates itself again.

As said above, level-of-detail controls are probably your best bet.

@hanatos do you think it would be worth considering an optional delay for compute so users on slow gpus could set that to like 1 second to make interactions somewhat smooth and only run compute after interaction ends?

1 Like
5

This helps! Still remains not really usable, but you get an idea how it is supposed to be. Thank you!

6

thinkable and kinda in the spirit of the frame limiter. i mean this GPU is 9 years old and was always low-end/integrated. i’m reluctant to introduce code complexity for devices that don’t have good vulkan support and would likely never be much fun to use in this context. seems like the best we could do is provide emergency support. unfortunately it appears that even the newer intel UHD and Iris Xe integrated GPUs don’t offer more queue families (other than for video decoding at times, if i see this correctly). as far as i understand another queue index will not suffice for async, it’ll have to be another family.

this delay you’re proposing can probably be achieved with a config setting and a carefully placed line of code in the darkroom_process() logic, so it’s likely not a terrible lot of extra complexity. a bit more for interaction-end kind of events.

1 Like
7

I fully accept that the old PC is the cause of the problems. There’s no reason to even think about solutions because of this. I did this installation mainly out of curiosity, because I really wanted to try out vkdt after following its development for quite some time. Unfortunately, it only worked on this Cachyos installation.
Now that I’ve switched to GIMP, Capture One is the only non-Linux program that forces me to use an Apple computer, and of course I’m keeping an eye on developments like that. The Mac, on the other hand, isn’t suitable for a proper installation of GIMP with G’mic. That’s why I can’t set up a proper environment on a single computer at the moment. This one is just a try.

8

Interesting, my notebook happens to use the same GPU (just checked, actually, I seem to have the 620), and I am using vkdt. I, too, have noticed, that the grade module is almost impossible to use, but the rest was okay for me.

9

ah okay? so something special about the mouse input handling in these widgets maybe… interesting observation.

10

After I have set

2 level of detail
10 dynamic LOD

many things seem better now. It is possible to rotate by dragging with the mouse, for example. The grade module responds, still very, very slow, but it does what it should, not only weird things, as before. So it’s usable. I admit that I don’t understand the colour circles. Is there something I am supposed to click or drag? Nothing happens there.
What still seems like a mouse issue: I understand that you should be able to reset a controller by doubleclicking. In a few cases this worked as expected, but usually it doesn’t.

11

When I grab the small circle in the middle of the coloured circles in grade, let’s take the second, “gamma”, than nothing changes in these controllers, but I can see in the opened history on the left side, that values change while I am dragging. Of course I know these controllers from lightroom/ C1 and so I expect the circles to move around.