Performance
Lively application and wallpapers are two separate things.
Lively comes with a video player and web browser - the wallpapers are basically videos and websites.
So to answer the question - it all depends on the wallpaper you choose to run.
Video wallpaper using dedicated gpu video hardware
Every gpu, including Intel HD graphics have dedicated hardware to decode video - so video wallpapers should be consistent in terms of resource cost if you use the same quality video (provided you are playing supported video file by your hardware, if working correctly taskmanager will show it as Video Decode in GPU Engine section.)
Website wallpaper resource usage will depend on its design (how often website refreshing, fps, animations..) and sometimes comes with its own performance setting under customization such as render scaling options.
Regardless of wallpaper type, lively will completetly pause the playback of the wallpaper when fullscreen apps or games run.
Additionally lively can:
- Pause wallpaper based on running application.
- Play wallpaper only on desktop. (Wallpaper Playback -> Other Application Focused -> Pause)
- Pause wallpaper when running on battery(laptop/ups)
Looking at Taskmanager cpu & gpu usage on the Processes tab can be misleading, because it is a relative measure based on clockspeed of the hardware.
Every cpu & gpu runs at various clockspeed based on performance demand, for example if the gpu is in low performance mode/idle (usually on desktop) with less than 500mhz the gpu usage will be very high which is still normal & consumes less power.
High usage can be due to low clockspeed, third party utility like gpu-z can be used to observe this.
If you are still worried about performance, I recommend the following:
Navigate to Settings -> Performance -> Wallpaper Playback
- Other Application Fullscreen -> Pause or Kill
- Other Application Focused -> Pause
- Display Pause Rule(multiple screen system) -> All Display(s)
- Pause Algorithm -> Foreground Process
Also for Laptops:
- When on Battery power -> Pause or Kill
Lively implements several logic for pausing wallpaper, can be changed by:
Settings -> Performance -> Wallpaper Playback -> Pause Algorithm
Current default, checks foreground program to determine wallpaper playback behavior.
Checks all running programs to determine wallpaper playback behavior (work in progress.)
Checks if a full-screen (exclusive mode) Direct3D application is running; none of the additional performance settings have any effect in this mode.
The data collected is stored only in-memory and never shared anywhere.
Windows by default may use the igpu/weaker gpu instead of the main gpu.
If performance is too slow make sure to change the gpu in windows/driver control panel for the following programs:
<install_location>/Plugins/UI/Lively.UI.WinUI.exe<install_location>/Plugins/Cef/Lively.PlayerCefSharp.exe<install_location>/Plugins/Mpv/mpv.exe
If you have multiple monitors, make sure they are all connected to the same gpu.
Currently Application type wallpaper pausing is not implemented due to pending issues.