Well, I’ve done it. I’ve run a sequence at 100FPS. (And I’m pretty sure nobody will notice. Sometimes you just do … stuff. For … reasons.)

Last Year

Last year, I wasn’t happy with how the whole house effects looked; they just weren’t smooth. This point was driven home when we went to see the excellent Christmas on Runaway show (which is the nicest one for many miles, has a real megatree, moving heads, and all of that) and thought it seemed a good bit smoother than mine. So, I wasn’t really getting 40FPS, and also set my sights on getting clean 40FPS and 100FPS if possible.

Changes

When the show isn’t clean, there can be more than one problem… sequence issues, player issues, network issues, controller issues, pixel issues. Primarily, my problems were the player and the controllers.

1. xSchedule was letting me down. I had noticed it was better if I didn’t have remote desktop active, but still some days were better than others. And maybe there were issues with that laptop, too. Both got changed out, and the new stack reports the frame times and packet delivery more thoroughly. I’m glad I did this, as I have 2x as many channels this year, xSchedule certainly couldn’t have done it.
2. The cheapo GigE switches I put in most enclosure builds held up to scrutiny.
3. Controllers weren’t displaying all the frames. I ran a variety of lab tests to see what the controller capability really is. I was running some HinksPix PRO v1 and v2 boards, and those have somewhat tight limits on what they can do at 40FPS; swapping them to v3 boards allows 250 pixels per port at 100FPS. The BBB-based controllers do over 300 pixels/port at 100FPS, and the Baldrick 8s do 300 pixels/port at 100 FPS. Due to the 2021 chip shortage, I have only a very small number of Falcons (F16v4 and F48v4), but they do well over 100 pixels/port at 100FPS. The other controllers that I was using didn’t make the cut … weren’t able to display all frames at 40FPS, let alone 100. Those got kicked out of the show and are sitting in a small pile in the basement awaiting their fate… if new firmware won’t fix them, I’m tempted to put some K32Max or similar boards in them.
4. I had some pixel strings that were longer than those supported by their controllers, but not many. (In 2021, when I started, I had the mistaken impression that the pixels used .6W-.7W each and that I’d need one controller port per 100 pixels, so I’ve always run a lower number of pixels per port.) There were a few places where I had 1 port on a single 350-400 node prop, but I added plugs.

There are still some exceptions. My new P5 panel does not handle over 40FPS. I had to set the player software to deliver frames to it at most every 25ms. Likewise, I have set the controller that feeds the P5 tombs to 1 frame every 20ms, but they don’t show any real problems when hit with too many frames, so maybe that wasn’t necessary.

Conclusion?

I hope you get some amusement out of this endeavor… putting many hours into something nobody else notices or cares about is part of the pathology of the hobby :-).