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.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
|
10.34 |
12.33 |
6.63 |
|
10.53 |
15.06 |
6.84 |
|
14.81 |
19.19 |
8.66 |
|
15.58 |
21.78 |
9.2 |