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Slow fade with touchgfx

sbi
Associate III

I'm using touchgfx 4.22 on a stm32h755zi mcu. The touchgfx run on the M7 core. The mcu is running at 480MHz.
The board is an internal board with a 800x480 display connected in parallel to the LTDC interface with a 18bit bus as shown below:

LTDC.jpg

I use an rgb565 buffer in an external psram. Touchgfx settings are as follow:

Touchgfx conf.jpg

And here the dma2d settings:

DMA2D conf.jpg

I've made a simple screen where there is a fade of a box of 800x480 pixel (all the screen) from gray color to transparent but this fade is very slow. With or without DMA, the result is the same.
Here a video of the fade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfER5-DQu4M
sorry for the poor video quality; however the screen starts in grey color and after 1 second the box in grey color disappears and another screen is shown. All of this with a fade effect.
And here it is how I made the fade; it's a simple interaction:

Fade.jpg

As far as I understand the fade duration should be 1s but it is 7-8 seconds. A part the wrong duration, the fade is quite sloppy with or without dma.

What am I doing wrong?

14 REPLIES 14
sbi
Associate III

Any advice? I still don't understand why my graphic is not accelerated...
Or, do you think that this is the best performance I can achieve with this mcu?

MM..1
Chief II

Seems you use no OS implementation. Here is your job manage timing and seems not good.

sbi
Associate III

I've choosen LTDC as Application Tick source as described here: https://support.touchgfx.com/docs/development/touchgfx-hal-development/scenarios/scenarios-ltdc-parallel-rgb
and as you can see also in a screenshot in my first post; I mean this:

sbi_1-1695109494233.png

At the end of the documentation, I read this:

sbi_0-1695108688307.png

and looking through the code I see that the isVsyncAvailable() is called everytime LTDC generates an interrupt. The interrupt handler that manages this is: HAL_LTDC_IRQHandler.
So I think it is all managed correctly but I see it is all slow.

Or maybe I've to do some timing management but I don't know how. Do you have any link in the documentation that I can follow?

Thank you

MM..1
Chief II

LTDC clock in clock config ? In theory you require around 25MHz

Maybe your PLL dont work ok.

sbi
Associate III

Yes it is set at 23MHz at the moment. I measured the dot clock on my tft with an oscilloscope and it is seems perfect and at 23MHz

MM..1
Chief II

an external psram you mean OCTOSPI

Try read about LTDC optimise LCD-TFT display controller (LTDC) on STM32 MCUs - Application note

sbi
Associate III

No I don't mean an OCTOSPI but a PSRAM

FMC Configuration.jpg

To be honest, I don't use a PSRAM since it's very difficult to find. However I am using a normal SRAM (a IS61WV102416FBLL-10TLI ) with 2 SN74LVC573APW latches and inverter for nadv.
The FMC clock is configured this way:

FMC Clock.jpg

With some simple read/write test I've found the fastest clock we can achieve in order to have best performance. As far as I can understand the ram clock is enough to cover my display but I can be wrong. I don't find in the document you linked me, a section regards psram (only sdram, octospi, qspi flash) so I hope to have made my calculation well.
If I lower the FMC clock I see that the screen is corrupt so I think with this configuration the sram is fast enough.

What I don't understand is why if I set a 1s transition with fade, the whole cicle is 7-8seconds.

P.S.
I've tried also what it is described here: https://support.touchgfx.com/docs/development/touchgfx-hal-development/scenarios/scenarios-measure-performance#performance-metrics
and measured with an oscilloscope the timings. The vsync signal seems to be generated every 17ms which seems correct to me.

MM..1
Chief II

As explained in pdf. Displays can have many bottlenecks and one worse wins. For redraw in animation full screen 800x480x2 fade full is read recals write = around 138MB/s troughput over memory bus.  Your memory is 3/1/1 clk 16bit wide then real speed is 229/2 little around required. Then next issues must exist , what holds bus ocupied...

Result is LTDC read framebuffer and send ok speed, but data in buffer is changed slow = animation skip frames.

Too double buffering make thiks worse... Try Performance | TouchGFX Documentation detect lost frames

sbi
Associate III

Sorry for the delay here... I'm coming to the conclusion that accessing this external ram is slow but I don't know why or what I've to do for making it faster.
I've made some very simple benchmark in order to see how fast is writing/reading/modifying the whole psram area

uint16_t psramRead = 0 ;
int begin;
int end;
int TimeRead;
int TimeWrite;
int TimeModify;
uint16_t *psram = 0x60000000;

begin = HAL_GetTick();

for (uint32_t i=0; i<1048576; i++){
	  psram[i] = 0x0;
}

TimeWrite = HAL_GetTick() - begin;

begin = HAL_GetTick();

for (uint32_t i=0; i<1048576; i++){
  psramRead = psram[i];
	 }

TimeRead = HAL_GetTick() - begin;

begin = HAL_GetTick();

for (uint32_t i=0; i<1048576; i++){
  psram[i] += 2 ;
	 }

TimeModify = HAL_GetTick() - begin;

In this test I see that
TimeWrite is around 170ms
TimeWrite is around 100ms
TimeWrite is around 180ms

This seems an enormous time for me. What am I doing wrong? Is there a way to make the access to the external ram faster?