The Researcher Edition (GPU v2.*) is a highly optimized version of Psykinematix that fully takes advantage of your computer's graphics card to bring real-time and full-screen generation of complex, time-varying, or very large stimuli without impacting its precious video memory !
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WHY WOULD YOU NEED THE GPU EDITION ?
Time-varying stimuli can monopolize a considerable amount of your computer resources because a new stimulus may have to be generated for each video frame and be stored in the limited video memory (see below to find out how much video memory would be typically required). Because of this, long delays and slow performance may ensue resulting in improper timing in your experiment.
While the Standard Edition of Psykinematix does a decent job to optimize the generation of time-varying stimuli (by skipping duplication for instance), the new GPU Edition of Psykinematix alleviates all these problems by translating and compiling the mathematical description you provide for your stimuli into a shader program that runs directly on the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) of your graphics card.
This results in full-screen stimuli generated in real-time, and this is totally automatic and transparent to the user ! The GPU Edition can even modulate the visual stimuli with variable parameters provided in real-time by some external equipment.
HOW MUCH VIDEO MEMORY IS NEEDED? LET'S DO THE MATH !
Let's assume you wish to present a static stimulus full-screen on a Full HD display (1920 x 1080) with a 8-bit format encoding for each pixel component. How much memory is needed to store this stimulus in your computer's graphics card? Let's do the math:
- An achromatic version of this stimulus would require: 1920 x 1080 bytes, that is about 2MB.
- A color (RGB) version of the same stimulus would require 3 times as much (i.e. 2 MB for each Red, Green and Blue component), that is 6 MB.
- Each stimulus would actually require an extra byte to encode transparency (the Alpha layer) in case your stimulus needs to be combined with a previously presented stimulus, that is as much as 8 MB for a RGBA stimulus.
Most people who needs long dynamic presentation will suffer eventually from this limitation, and typically would have to make some compromises, by either:
- maxing out the amount of video memory when selecting their computer's graphics card,
- decreasing the resolution of their display if they cannot upgrade their graphics card,
- decreasing the size of their stimulus (as well as the viewing distance to maintain a constant visual angle),
- or producing a cyclic version of their stimulus if possible (e.g. for 1 second and repeated as needed).
That's what the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) of your graphics card can do for you if it is directly programmed using the OpenGL shading language (similar to C language). The Psykinematix GPU Edition does that for you automatically: it translates the mathematical description you provide for your time-varying stimulus into a shader program compiled for your graphics card GPU.
Release Notes
Version 2.1 (Researcher/GPU Edition) Released: June 21, 2017 | |
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Same improvements as Version 1.6 below: + Feature Improvements:
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Version 1.6 (Student/Standard Edition) Released: June 21, 2017 | |
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Version 2.0.2 (Researcher/GPU Edition) Released: Sept 20th, 2016 | |
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Full Compatibility with Mac OS X 10.12 (Sierra) |
Version 2.0.1 (Researcher/GPU Edition) Released: Jan 7th, 2016 | |
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Full Compatibility with Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) |
Version 2.0 (Researcher/GPU Edition) Released: July 28, 2015 | |
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Same improvements as Version 1.5 below: + New Features:
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Version 1.5 (Student/Standard Edition) Released: July 28, 2015 | |
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Version 1.4.2 Released: October 22, 2012 | |
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Version 1.4.1 Released: October 1, 2012 | |
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Version 1.4 Released: June 21, 2012 | |
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Version 1.3.2 Released: July 25, 2011 | |
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Psykinematix is now fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 ("Lion")! Fixed:
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Version 1.3.1 Released: July 23, 2011 | |
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Version 1.3 Released: May 3, 2011 | |
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Version 1.2.3 Released: July 21, 2010 | |
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Version 1.2.2 Released: April 30, 2010 | |
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Version 1.2.1 Released: April 15, 2010 | |
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Version 1.2 Released: April 5, 2010 | |
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Version 1.1.1 Released: January 20, 2010 | |
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Version 1.1 Released: December 2, 2009 | |
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Version 1.0 RC5 Released: June 5, 2009 | |
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Version 1.0 RC4 Released: August 4, 2008 | |
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Version 1.0 RC3 Released: June 12, 2008 | |
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Version 1.0 RC2 Released: May 1, 2008 | |
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Version 1.0 RC1 Released: February 21, 2008 | |
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Release Candidate 1 |