Video adapter which works well with Quicken?

Rocket J Squirrel · January 21

I wonder whether there are any video adapters which speed up Quicken's screen painting.

On my Win10 "desktop" (really a tower on the floor) PC, I have an Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti. A reasonable middling adapter for a 10-year-old computer. When I start Quicken or return from a manual backup, the Quicken window repaints 3 times. It's been doing this for years, and it's really started to annoy me. (My laptop has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti as well as the default on-board Intel graphics chip, and the same triple-paint occurs there regardless of adapter.)

I wonder whether anyone can recommend a video adapter which is better at displaying Quicken. My fantasy is an adapter which notices redundant screen refreshes and optimizes them away. I'm guessing it would be something other than an Nvidia GeForce if it exists at all.

Is anybody out there not seeing a triple repaint at Q startup and when returning from manual backup? If so, please let me know what kind of video adapter you have.

Sherlock · January 21

We use the Microsoft Remote Display Adapter when we use Quicken and do not experience any significant screen painting issues. Quicken has introduced additional network activity and temporary graphical pop-ups at Quicken file open which have degraded the experience. Note: We use an older dual 2.5 GHz processor.

Chris_QPW · January 21

I don't believe there is any video adapter that will speed up Quicken's screen painting, only ones that will slow it down. As in most of the time I have heard complains on here about such things the people have really high power display adapters. Now part of that problem is subjective. Like they are expecting their high power adapter to make Quicken's GUI perform like their other programs, and it doesn't. But sometimes the more powerful the more likely there is going to be some driver conflict or such that slows it down.

Mostly I have been using AMD "APUs" which have the GPU integrated. And until recently that definitely means a GPU that is "so so", and the performance is fine.

I currently setup a new main computer with an AMD Ryzen 3100, that doesn't have a GPU. I intend to upgrade that processor when the 5700G becomes available, with quite a good GUI integrated into it, but expect no difference in the display refreshing times in Quicken.

Currently in the meantime I'm using a NVIDA GT 710 because it support multiple HDMI ports (the one I have has 4 HDMI ports with max resolution of 2560x1600).

markus1957 · January 22

A year ago, I got a new lower end PC with an Optane drive and Integrated Intel GPU. I noticed more of a performance improvement from the small SSD integrated into the hybrid hard drive than the updated GPU. That applies to both rendering the images and calculation time to update tables.

Adding- as to the triple paint, I see it both on startup and after a manual backup. It's more of a triple flicker in that it is so fast; startup is less perceptible than after the manual backup return.

Chris_QPW · January 22

markus1957 said:

Adding- as to the triple paint, I see it both on startup and after a manual backup. It's more of a triple flicker in that it is so fast; startup is less perceptible that after the manual backup return.

I just wanted to say that this is my perception of the problem on "most" of my computers/screens. That goes from using my new machine described above, to my old machine that has a A10 APU using the internal GPU (whether local or using Remote Desktop). To my wife's Intel I7-8700K using the internal GPU.

For a very old Dell Latitude D620 laptop (with a "Designed for Windows XP", but it does have a SSD) I see more delay, maybe a half a second to a second delay on these refreshes.

And I can tell you one thing there isn't going to be a display adapter that optimizes this out. The best you are going to get is a faster "flicker".

The reason is simple, the display is being told to "go blank" in between. This isn't a case where the same thing is written "twice".

I started out in hardware so I know a few things about how display adapters work, and as a software developer about GUI/Windows systems, and the way the software works has always bugged me. And this is an example of it.

Take my video display card above. 2GB of memory. Max resolution 2560x1600. Even if it is using 32-bit color that comes out to 2560 * 1600 * 4 bytes (this is for 32-bit color) = 16MB and then times 4 displays equals 64MB. So even for this modest display adapter there is tons of memory for storing frames before they are put on the screen. And I can tell you that GPUs have had the ability to switch between different blocks/frames of data/pixels in an instant from the very beginning.

Not to mention I can't see how the monitor/display itself doesn't have enough memory for at least one hidden frame.

So why do we see changes as they happen in a program like Quicken?
It isn't the hardware. It is how Quicken and Windows APIs do their updates. They do them incrementally as in part of the screen at a time, and also when called for a "refresh" Windows APIs actually call for the screen to be cleared. There is a setting in most Windows GUIs for "double buffering". The idea there was back when you had CRTs that didn't have "memory" and the updating of the information was done during the "blanking period". Depending on how fast things were being changed in the pixel data and how fast it was pushed out to the CRT you could get "flickering" due to part of the data being "inconsistent". So having one frame for sending the data, and another for the graphic library to do its updates in. But I have NEVER seen this setting to make any difference.

The bottom line as far as I'm concerned is that Windows (and lot of the others) have terrible low level graphics programming and Quicken handling of such just builds on this problem. The one thing that strikes me about GUI programming is that you have to "know the tricks". You can't just "use it", you have to know that if you do XXX it will slow this down or you use YYY it will cause a refresh like this and get results like this problem that this thread is about.

Rocket J Squirrel · January 22

Chris_QPW said:

markus1957 said:

Adding- as to the triple paint, I see it both on startup and after a manual backup. It's more of a triple flicker in that it is so fast; startup is less perceptible that after the manual backup return.

The bottom line as far as I'm concerned is that Windows (and lot of the others) have terrible low level graphics programming and Quicken handling of such just builds on this problem.

I can't agree to blame this on Windows. This is Quicken using ancient methods of screen painting. Much of QWin is stuck with old display code which does not take advantage of modern GUI APIs combined with lazy programming which does too much repainting because calculating the minimum repaint needed is too hard.

The triple-paint actually seems to speed up if I speed up my CPU. I have an Asus ROG gaming laptop which allows clock speed to be adjusted from Windows without having to go to the BIOS settings. Speeding up the CPU from "Windows" mode to "Performance" mode causes the triple-paint to go faster. Who would ever have thought you need a high-speed gaming laptop to make Quicken acceptably fast?

Chris_QPW · January 22

Rocket J Squirrel said:

Who would ever have thought you need a high-speed gaming laptop to make Quicken acceptably fast?

I would. Windows APIs for standard GUIs doesn't make much use of the power of new GPUs. The CPU is still doing most of all graphics work.

And that is why I say that the problem is in fact "partly" in the Windows APIs.

Video adapter which works well with Quicken?

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