DropShadow with static source is faster when using "cached:true"

Question

I'll begin with my testcase. It creates 21 unchanging shadowed blue rectangles. It also creates a 1x1px Canvas3D repainted constantly, so I can check how often it manages to get repainted with all the other stuff going on (Canvas3D has a built-in fps property). When cached: true is set on the DropShadow items, I get 60 FPS. When not, I get 30 FPS. But what I expect is to get the same FPS in both cases, since I don't expect the shadows' blur to ever get recalculated, considering that the source rects never get updated.

main.cpp: (trivial)

#include <QGuiApplication>
#include <QQmlApplicationEngine>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    QGuiApplication app(argc, argv);

    QQmlApplicationEngine engine;
    engine.load(QUrl(QStringLiteral("qrc:/main.qml")));

    return app.exec();
}

main.qml:

import QtQuick 2.5
import QtQuick.Window 2.2
import QtCanvas3D 1.1

Window {
    visible: true
    width: 800
    height: 600
    id: window

    Column {
        Text {
            text: canvas3d.fps + " FPS"
            font.pointSize: 18
        }
        Flow {
            width: window.width
            spacing: 10
            Repeater {
                model: 21

                ShadowedItem {
                }
            }
        }
        Canvas3D {
            id: canvas3d
            width: 1; height: 1 // nonzero size so it can be redrawn
            property var gl;

            onInitializeGL: {
                // should get and save context, otherwise FPS isn't measured for some reason
                gl = canvas3d.getContext("canvas3d", {depth:true, antialias:true, alpha:true});
            }
        }
    }
}

ShadowedItem.qml:

import QtQuick 2.0
import QtGraphicalEffects 1.0

Item {
    width: 100
    height: 100

    Rectangle {
        anchors.fill: parent
        id: rect
        visible: false
        color: "blue"
    }

    DropShadow {
        source: rect
        anchors.fill: rect
        cached: true // !
        radius: 8
    }
}

Any idea on the difference in performance?

Stefan Monov Stefan Monov · Accepted Answer · 2016-10-14T14:12:45

I posted a follow-up question about this. In the comments to it, I learned that when 1 item in the scene (e.g. the Canvas3D in this case) needs to be redrawn, the entire scene gets redrawn. Which means that every time my Canvas3D is redrawn (which is constantly), all the shadows get redrawn. This, if cached is false, means that the blur gets recalculated, hence the slowdown.

DropShadow with static source is faster when using "cached:true"

1 Answers