To increase the framerate of a Basler Cameralink Camera(A504K) with a Card Grabber PCIE-1429

Question

Hi,
I am using a monochrome Basler Cameralink Camera(A504K)of resolution 1280x1024 with a card grabber PCIE-1429 (x4 slot). The image acquisition is controlled through MAX  of LabVIEW version 11.0.1. The problem is that when I try to reduce the number of rows(more specifically Height) from 1024 to 32(say)in the acquisition window(of MAX), the frame rate of the camera should increase almost upto 16,000fps. But it is not going beyond 248fps. Can you suggest  me, why is it so happening, Or How to increase its frame rate? Also, below the image window there appeared something like: 1280x32    1X   8-bit image  9. What does 1X actually mean here?For your ready reference I am also attaching the image of the acquisation window.
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Answer 1

Hi Anto,
things are more complicated in my case. The computer I/O and/or speed of the HDD do no let me to save large stream of frames at desired frame rate. Therefore, I do following:
1) send each frame into the queue; I had to reduce frame size to 720x512 instead of full resolution
2) since I have 8 cores on that machine, I created 4 tasks which do only one thing: take a frame from the queue and save it into the disk as fast as possible with no image processing
3) saving on the HDD is an issue, so each of 4 tasks save frames into the virtual 24Gb drive instead of the real HDD. Even SSD drive will not help you!
4) note, frames are saved in an uncompressed BMP format! If you attempt to save them as jpg then your CPU will spend crucial 2-10ms for compressing it.
With this implementation and camera (with specs of only 340fps) I managed to grab frames with peak 735fps rate. My point is that your bottleneck probably lies not in the method you use/call to save the frames, but in computer hardware and I/O. You have to accumulate frames in RAM or virtual drive and then save them without processing.
I still have some frame loses, it is approximately 1-2% of the frames are lost. I do not know why.  Some notes:
1)      to achieve as less as possible frame loss you have to minimize information you output on UI in real-time.
2)      Utilize multitasking!
3)      Put highest priority for your VI (check settings in properties)
4)      In theory the 64bit should perform a bit better than 32bit LabView, in my experience it is in opposite. I run 32bit LabView on 64bit Windows7 machine. This is strange…
5)      Unfortunately 32bit LV has limitation on RAM allocation (4Gb only) otherwise I would store all captured frames in RAM (32Gb) avoiding even usage of the virtual drive. I use 24Gb virtual drive. It is enough for me to capture frames for about 1-1.5 minutes @735fps.
6)      If you need any kind of real-time image processing (which I would like to have) then probably you need to purchase FPGA card and program it.
Actually, seem that LabView and VDM modules do not utilize computer hardware optimally. I would like to use the power of all cores and even GPU. The GPU can encode and process images, but LV has limited support of it.
The best option for lossless capturing, at least for me, is to find the time and write a C++ code which will do the job.
regards,
 Alexander