Presenter performance varies based on your PowerPoint content, computer hardware, and options made in Presenter and for your graphics display. Unless directed otherwise (by setting a specific FPS speed) Presenter will try to maintain a consistent 30 FPS (frame per second) speed, which is the speed of North American video. Many newer cards have far faster capacity, and you will not see an impact to Presenter performance until you’ve added enough stress (via data, resolution, or quality options) for the FPS rate to drop below 30. When this occurs you will begin to see “stutters” or sluggish playback, and you will want to consider the following variables in regaining smooth performance.

The impact of Hardware on Performance

Your upper end performance is usually dictated by your computer’s hardware configuration. The following characteristics affect Presenter performance the most dramatically, and should be taken into account (in order) when choosing a system to run Presenter:

1. Graphics Card Bus Type

   The bus type has the greatest performance impact because it defines what type of card can be used, its bandwidth, and memory usage.
   • An AGP or PCI Express graphics bus is recommended. Both options have suitable bandwidth and a wide variety of suitable 3D graphics cards to choose from. The faster the AGP bus (the more “X”), generally the better.
   • Integrated Graphics solutions with dedicated memory (e.g., ATI 9100 IGP) will have slower performance then AGP, but may be suitable for many presentations.
   • Integrated Graphics solutions using shared memory (e.g., Intel GMA graphics) will generally have very poor 3D performance, and are not recommended for use with Presenter.

2. Graphics Card Model

   Performance can vary dramatically according to the model of graphics card used.
   • The rule of “the latest is the fastest” is not always the case, as some models, or even generations of cards, may sacrifice performance for things such as increased rendering capabilities or less power usage.
   • The determination “of which card is the fastest” will also depend upon the FXTheme being used, and to some extent, the type of content being loaded into PowerPoint.
   • Instant Effects is working with hardware manufacturers to produce benchmark files so a more accurate assessment of individual graphics card performance can be reported.

3. Graphics Card Memory Amount

   • More video memory (also called texture memory) will allow your graphics card to process more data without paging, and thus maintain higher frame rates.
   • More texture memory will also allow you to increase your card’s anti-aliasing levels, and thus presentation quality, without decreasing performance. Increased quality levels begin to be practical with 128 MB of dedicated video memory.

4. Graphics Card Clock Speed

   All other elements being equal, a card’s clock speed will improve performance in a near linear manner (e.g., a 500 MHz graphics processor should run 25% faster then a the same GPU at 400 MHz). The speed of the graphics card memory is also a factor to consider.

5. System CPU Speed

   Presenter balances its computations between the graphics card and the CPU when the graphics card starts reaching its limits. CPU speed can also improve display performance when playing back compressed video or when changing content rapidly.

6. System RAM

   Graphics intensive PowerPoint files will load faster into Presenter when the system has sufficient RAM to process numerous images, charts & graphs. This performance impact should only occur your first time Presenter is started for any given presentation. Subsequent starts of Presenter will then only translate slides which have changed since the previous session.

Impact of Options on Performance

1. Display Resolution setting

   • The larger your display resolution, the more pixels that are being rendered and the more it impacts performance. For example, a 1024x768 display requires 60% more pixels than a 800x600, while a 1600x1200 display requires 144% more then the 1024x768.
   • Laptops with high resolution screens (e.g., 1680x1050) will often have a difficult time maintaining 30 FPS. When projecting, most projectors will actually use either 1024x768 or 800x600 for their actual display after you toggle from Laptop Screen to Secondary Device, and the performance will be much better. To better understand your actually presentation performance, you should set your laptop’s display to the lower resolution when editing and running through your presentation on your laptop.

2. Display Resolution – Direct3D Anti-Aliasing setting

   • A graphic card’s Anti-Aliasing setting impacts performance according to how many samples (e.g., 2X, 4X, 6X, 8X, etc.) you are requesting of it. The higher the sampling, the smoother the rendered edges, but at the cost of the card’s texture memory. How high you can set Anti-Aliasing while maintaining acceptable performance will vary per card. To understand the impact, begin with no Anti-Aliasing, examine the results, increase to 2X and examine the results, increase to 4X and examine the results, and so on.
   • A good indicator of what your card’s practical limit is often found in the Display Settings/Advanced/Direct3D setting, where a maximum resolution is usually listed for a given display resolution. If you are using the maximum setting for your resolution, then the majority of texture memory is being used by Anti-Aliasing and what remains may not be enough to quickly load the desired PowerPoint content into Presenter.

Ensuring Smooth Performance

The first time you run through a presentation in full screen, the time to go from slide to slide can seem slow on some files as Presenter builds and caches the slide content. Your playback should be much faster after going through each slide. If you move your PowerPoint file to another machine for a presentation, you should explicitly build the cache on the new machine, or run in full screen from start to finish before presenting. You are then sure have the smoothest playback your system is capable of.