Series 5 Players and GPU Rendering

Series 5 players allow you to decode video more flexibly by engaging the GPU as part of the decode process, but for best performance you should try to avoid GPU rendering because:

• The BrightSign SoC has a more efficient dedicated system to handle video.

• This leaves the GPU free for graphics, HTML animations, and other GPU-specific uses.

• Once the GPU is engaged, it engages all the graphics across the entire screen instead of just a single video stream.

To avoid or reduce GPU rendering:

• On XD5, HD5, and/or LS5 players, play only one 4K video at a time (if you play two videos, you will start to use GPU). This is not an issue on higher-end Series 5 players.

• Video, smooth tickers, subtitles/captions, and the mouse cursor are content types that use hardware planes. If you add a lot of this type of content, it will use too many hardware planes and start rendering on the GPU, causing you to unknowingly use additional GPU resources.

• On both Series 4 and 5 players, we have optimizations for single full page widgets (for example, an HTML5 Widget) so when possible use a single rather than multiple widgets to reduce the amount of GPU rendering.