>Psychtoolbox>PsychTests

BeampositionTest - Test GPU scanout position (“beamposition”) queries.

Usage: BeampositionTest([n=10000][, screenid=max][, synced=0])

Opens a onscreen window on screen ‘screenid’ (default = maximum screenid)
and runs a sample loop, performing ‘n’ (default 10000) beamposition
queries, either as fast as it can if ‘synced’ == 0, or it performs
Screen(‘Flip’) and takes one sample after each flip, ie., in sync with
vertical retrace.

Then it plots its samples in multiple figures:
Beamposition vs. sample count, Beamposition vs. time, a histogram of all
sampled beampositions, and the duration of each query in msecs.

Here’s what you should see on a properly working system:

Beamposition against time or samplecount should show a periodic sawtooth pattern,
where scanout starts at zero and increments up to the value VBL Endline,
as reported by PTB’s Matlab output. The histogram should show an even
distribution (a flat line) across all bins from bin 0 to bin “VBL
Endline”. Query times should be in the low microsecond range, e.g.,
not much more than 20-30 usecs on a modern machine on average.

Other things you might see:

Periodic spikes in the query times and possibly some gaps, or total loss
of signal in the histogram at values higher than “VBL Startline” and or a
spike in the histogram for beamposition bin zero: Your graphics driver or
hardware has a small bug for which PTB can compensate, at the cost of
higher query times and thereby slightly degraded realtime behaviour of
your system. This is usually accompanied by some warnings wrt. slightly
broken beamposition queries.

No spikes in query times but no values abouve “VBL Startline” at all in
the histograms and plots: A slightly broken graphics driver, but PTB
couldn’t compensate for the bug because it didn’t detect the problem.
Manual ways to enable the workaround are explained in ‘help
ConserveVRAMSettings’, section ‘kPsychUseBeampositionQueryWorkaround’.

Beampositions implausibly high or low for your display. PTB may query the
wrong display on a multi-display setup. See ‘help DisplayOutputMappings’
for remedies.

A flat-line of all-zero beampositions: Beamposition queries are
unsupported, disabled or broken on your setup. If you know they should
work, then PTB may query the wrong display on a multi-display setup. See
‘help DisplayOutputMappings’ for remedies. Another possible fix is
installing and loading the PsychtoolboxKernelDriver on OSX (‘help
PsychtoolboxKernelDriver’) or running PsychLinuxConfiguration on Linux
and rebooting the machine once to enable our own beamposition query
mechanism. On Linux this is not needed when using the free and
open-source graphics drivers, as these have a builtin timestamping
mechanism which is even more robust and precise than beampositionq
queries. On Linux with NVidia or AMD proprietary binary drivers this is
always needed once for a given machine. On OSX it is increasingly needed
due to total lack of OS support on Intel and AMD graphics cards and
increasingly broken support for NVidia graphics cards. On OSX with NVidia
graphics cards you additionally need to apply the measures explained in
‘help ConserveVRAMSettings’ - the section about kPsychDontUseNativeBeamposQuery.

A flat-line not at zero, but at some fixed value. See previous paragraph:
Install the kernel drivers or setup Linux properly, apply the kPsychDontUseNativeBeamposQuery
fix on OSX, possibly apply measures from ‘help DisplayOutputMappings’.

Weird looking non-sawtooth patterns: This is a totally broken graphics
driver, often to be found on Apple machines running OSX with Apple Retina
displays or other LCD flat panels. See previous paragraph for fixes.

-> Most fixes involve switching to our own implementation of beamposition
queries instead of using broken or missing OS implementations, and then
some fiddling around.

-> On MS-Windows there’s usually no way to fix broken queries beyond the
automatic fixes applied by Screen() if it detects a problem.