Improving Performance

HoloOcean is fairly performant by default, but you can also sacrifice features to increase your frames per second.

Frame Rate

The frame rate can have a large impact on performance. The frame rate is set in the scenario configuration. See Frame Rates for details on how to set the ticks_per_sec and frames_per_sec to optimize performance for your specific task.

Sonar Sensors

The sonar sensors can be taxing on performance. There’s a number of things that can be done to help improve their performance as well.

Lowering Octree Resolution

The Octree resolution has a large impact on sonar performance. The higher octree_min is, the less leaves there are to search through, and the faster it’ll run. This will have an impact on image quality, especially at close distances. If most objects that are being inspected are a ways away, this parameter can be safely increased quite a bit.

See Octree Configuration for info on how to do that.

Changing Ticks-Per-Capture

The sonar sample rate can be reduced to increase the average frames per second. See Sensor Configuration and the Hz parameter for more info.

Camera Sensors

If using a Camera or RGBCamera sensor, rendering the camera frames each tick will significantly impact performance. Rendering the camera every frame causes a context switch deep in the rendering code of the engine, which has a significant performance penalty.

This chart shows how much performance you can expect to gain or lose by adjusting or disabling the Camera (left column is frame time in milleseconds).

Note

The following tests were performed in the original Holodeck, but the results should be similar for HoloOcean.

Resolution	UrbanCity		MazeWorld		AndroidPlayground
No Camera	8.55 ms	117 fps	4.69 ms	213 fps	2.47 ms	405 fps
64	17 ms	59 fps	11 ms	91 fps	4.87 ms	205 fps
128	20 ms	50 fps	11.6 ms	86 fps	5.59 ms	179 fps
256	22 ms	45 fps	14.71 ms	68 fps	9.02 ms	111 fps
512	35 ms	29 fps	30.8 ms	32 fps	24.81 ms	40 fps
1024	89 ms	11 fps	84.2 ms	12 fps	94.55 ms	11 fps
2048	410 ms	2 fps	383 ms	3 fps	366 ms	3 fps

Removing the Camera

Removing the camera entirely will significantly improve performance. For custom scenarios, simply remove the camera from the scenario configuration file you are using. To modify pre-made scenarios, the easiest method is simply to create a new custom scenario based on the one you want to use, and remove the camera from the configuration.

See Making Custom Scenarios.

Lowering the Camera Resolution

Lowering the resolution of the RGBCamera or Camera can also help speed things up. Create a custom scenario, and in the configuration block for the RGBCamera or Camera, set the CaptureWidth and CaptureHeight.

See RGBCamera and Camera for more details.

Changing Ticks-Per-Capture

The camera sample rate can be reduced to increase the average frames per second. See Sensor Configuration and the Hz parameter for more info.

Disable Viewport Rendering

Rendering the viewport window can be unnecessary when running simulations sequentially, such as when using HoloOcean for reinforcement learning. You can disable the viewport with the should_render_viewport() method (see Using HoloOcean Headless for details).

At lower camera resolutions, disabling the viewport can improve framerates by up to 40%.

Change Render Quality

You can adjust HoloOcean to render at a lower (or higher) quality to improve performance. See the set_render_quality() method.

Below is a comparison of render qualities and the frame time in ms.

Quality	MazeWorld	UrbanCity	AndroidPlayground
0	10.34	12.33	6.63
1	10.53	15.06	6.84
2	14.81	19.19	8.66
3	15.58	21.78	9.2