Repainting issues and global crosshair

[JoshDance]

Perhaps the most annoying trait of NT is that when I use the global crosshair, the non-active windows don't get repainted, so I'm left with pictures like this. I'm constantly moving my mouse over the non-active windows to get them to repaint. It makes horizontal and vertical lines drawn on the chart virtually useless (in the included picture, there are none--all the lines are from this problem). Any trader who uses s/r levels would make this the #1 priority to fix; any suggestions for fixing this?

[NinjaTrader_Chip]

Hello JoshDance,

Thank you for your post.

This could be attributable to the capacity of the graphics card and/or insufficient resources to support a higher refresh rate.

At what level do you begin to experience this cross-hair issue?

You may also want to have a look at this list of several Performance Tips:

http://www.ninjatrader.com/support/helpGuides/nt7/index.html?performance_tips2.htm

[JoshDance]

Hi Chip,

I've recorded a video and provided the link below to demonstrate the issues.

This isn't a performance issue. I have 8GB of RAM, and a 128MB or 256MB graphics card, and can watch full-screen HD with no problem. Especially notice the upper right chart at 4:30 in the video--would you want to trade and see that?

Now, if you can show me a video of you doing this and not having any issues, I'll suspect that it may be a driver issue for my graphics card. But I'd be very surprised if that's what it is, since no other program has done anything like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC-K9Nr_zos&hd=1

[NinjaTrader_Chip]

Hello Josh

I reviewed the video. Let me confer with one of my colleagues who had a similar issue and provide next steps.

I will post the updated info/instructions.

[JoshDance]

Thanks, I appreciate the effort!

[NinjaTrader_Chip]

Hello Josh

One thing you may want to check if your graphics acceleration setting. See if modifying the configuration will help relieve this global crosshair ghosting & lack of update/refresh.

Also – does your graphics adapter operate on ‘shared’ memory or is/are your graphics card(s) using dedicated video memory.

[JoshDance]

Chip,

It's a Radeon HD 5700 series in a brand new computer, with 128MB or 256MB onboard memory. As I'm using the global crosshair now in the live market, it seems that the window is refreshed when a new tick comes in. If I move the crosshair out of the active window, the crosshair is removed from this active window on an incoming tick, but it still stays in the inactive window.

This does not happen with the regular crosshair--the ghosting happens, but on an incoming tick the window is refreshed, even if it's not the active window.

This being the case, I see no way this can be a problem on my end related to the hardware. Why would changing the crosshair type cause the problem if the issue was on my end? If you have specific suggestions for settings to change, I welcome them. Your colleague who had experienced the issue as well--what's the status there? If he or she experienced the issue, then perhaps you can work together to solve it?

I'd still love to see you or someone post a video where problem does not occur. I'm open to this being something wrong on my system, but I need something specific to go on.

[eDanny]

I have 3 charts with the global crosshair enabled and the crosshair remains in two of the charts all the time, it only gets refreshed out of the last chart used (moved cursor out of). Using two vid cards here with four screens. One has 256 MB and the other 768 MB. Only 199 MB of the 256 MB card is being used. Hope this info helps.

Dan

[JoshDance]

Thanks Dan, glad to hear I'm not the only one. Still, I'd still like to hear from anyone who does NOT have this problem. Anybody? If enough people do have this problem, we can at least verify that the issue lies within the hands of NT.

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Hello,

Will do some more research on this and get back to you.

Thanks for your patience.

[Alfred]

Global suggestion...

Suggestion in this area...left click and hold down to move the global cross hair may be better than the way it is done now...that way one could move the pointer to another location or window (global activated or not) without destroying your current global set up of interest on all globally activated windows....

Thanks....

[hcgaloi]

JoshDance,

NT has crosshair pointer issue for a long time. It seems that the development team doesn't know how to fix it, so the only thing that support team can do is to blame it on video card's performance problem. I made the mistake of purchasing a high-performance video card for about $600, and it didn't solve or even make a slight improvement.

Below is the spec on the card:

Diamond Radeon HD5970 2GB PCI-Express Video Card

Specifications
Interface: PCI Express x16
Core Clock: 725 MHz
Memory Clock: 1.0 GHz x2
Memory Type: GDDR5
Memory Size: 2048MB
Ports: 2 Dual-Link DVI, 1 mini Display Port
Features
Compliant with DirectX® 11 and earlier revisions
ATI Eyefinity technology with support for up to three displays
ATI Stream technology
Designed for DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL
Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)
GDDR5 memory
More than 4 teraFLOPS of processing power
ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance7
Supports OpenGL 3.2
DL-DVI, DL-DVI, Mini DisplayPort
PCI Express® 2.1 support
ATI Avivo™ HD video and display technology 2
Advanced dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay™ technology
Engine clock speed: 725 MHz
Processing power (single precision): 4.64 TeraFLOPS
Processing power (double precision): 928 GigaFLOPS
Polygon throughput: 1.45 billion polygons/sec
Data fetch rate (32-bit): 464 billion fetches/sec
Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 116 Gigatexels/sec
Pixel fill rate: 46.4 Gigapixels/sec
Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 185.6 Gigasamples/sec
Memory clock speed: 1.0 GHz
Memory data rate: 4.0 Gbps
Memory bandwidth: 256.0 GB/sec

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Hello,

Thanks for your patience.

Guys I have done some research into this. It looks like the only suggestion we can make at this time is to turn off hardware acceleration in your video settings for the PC to see if this helps you in your specific setup.

We get very few complaints on this as most likely is Dependant on many items, such as which video card drivers, indicators applied to chart, whether you have the start menu set to auto hide. Version of windows in use, etc. etc. that can affect this.

A larger video card would always solve the issue if they use the same drivers for example. That is if the video card is whats causing the issues, most likely a combination of the above factors is at fault however.

Development is aware of the issue and we are considering a change to cross hair methodology in future versions of NinjaTrader. However if your current setup is causing this to occur it is unfortunately a limitation with the cross hair at this time.

[JoshDance]

Brett, can you post a video of any computer where this issue is not present?

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Hello,

There are 2 issues here.

Blinking crosshair or not quick enough update when you are currently in the charts. Seperate of using any other apoplication just NinjaTrader and is what my post below addresses.

There is a secondary behaivior of the global crosshair(This is different then crosshair), not to be confused with my below post. Which has to do with your youtube video and now having NinjaTrader in focus and inside of another application. This is ruled by .net framework and the windows form controls we use from them. Everyhting you have shown in your youtube video is expected when using the global crosshairs and are limitations of the global crosshair at this time.

Thanks for your understanding.