Dirty regions

Enabling dirty regions can help speed up the GUI in XBMC and decrease the demand on your CPU and GPU. Dirty regions has no effect during video playback unless there are GUI elements (on screen buttons) visible. The video itself is unaffected by these settings. For more information see: Working with dirty regions

Using dirty regions requires a pre-Eden nightly build of XBMC.

1. Create a text document and save it as advancedsettings.xml (or edit the existing one if you've already made it)

2. Cut and paste the following into your new advancedsettings.xml file:

<advancedsettings>
 <gui>    
   <algorithmdirtyregions>1</algorithmdirtyregions>
   <nofliptimeout>1000</nofliptimeout>
 </gui>
</advancedsettings>

3. Place your advancedsettings.xml file in your userdata folder.

4. Done!

Technical notes

From the advancedsettings.xml page:

<algorithmdirtyregions>

Enable dirty-region processing. Dirty regions are any parts of the screen that have changed since the last frame. By not re-rendering what hasn't changed, big speed gains can be seen. Because all GPUs work differently, only Mode 3, combined with nofliptimeout=0, is guaranteed to be safe for everyone, but current timing issues with nofliptimeout keep this from being the default.

Example:

<gui>    
  <algorithmdirtyregions>1</algorithmdirtyregions>
</gui>

<nofliptimeout>

Specifies the timeout in milliseconds after which XBMC will not flip the graphics buffers anymore when nothing has been rendered, this lowers both CPU and GPU usage.

• -1: disabled
• 0 or higher: timeout in milliseconds (0 is default)

Example:

<gui>    
  <nofliptimeout>1000</nofliptimeout>
</gui>