I just wrote a custom progress bar, it's single buffered and will remain so. How many frames per second are desirable for something like this? I don't want to waste too much CPU updating the screen unnecessarily.
+4
A:
As a rule of thumb, 10 fps is a reasonable minimum for very small, simple animations with motion. 30 fps is a minimum for more complex motion and/or larger scenes.
However, generally progress bars have very little change from frame to frame. If you are using a very simple animation, you may find that less than 10fps works.
I suggest starting at 10fps and checking the result. Tune from there.
Eric J.
2010-05-20 00:00:15
This was the best answer, due to the fact that I omitted. I wasn't really writing a progress bar, more of an in-progress bar. Just goes back and forth until an unmeasurable http upload completes.
Tom Dignan
2010-05-20 20:28:18
+1
A:
I'd be happy with an update per second or two for functional purposes.
10-20 fps if you want it to look good.
David
2010-05-20 00:03:41
+3
A:
You might want to go the other way around and update the progress bar whenever there is a pixel of bar to update. If you have a 200 pixel bar, then update it when each 0.5% of the processing is completed. That’s every 300 ms for a 1 minute process but every 4.5 s for a 15 min process. As the examples indicate, the fps will generally be slower than you’d need for smooth large-motion animation; otherwise, you wouldn’t need a progress bar. Depending on your design, it may be easier to have the process announce to the progress bar each time it completes x% than to have the progress bar keep checking process every n ms.
Michael Zuschlag
2010-05-20 12:12:31