Why does retrieving the `PixelBuffer` of only one eye improve performance significantly on 2020 Mac mini?

Hi all!

I'm maintaining a 3D video player, it's great to see we've developed MV-HEVC packed with great features that media industry love to use. This player uses macOS AV frameworks to decode MV-HEVC and plays time-interleaving signal on capable devices, such as DLP-Link projectors, 3D vision glasses syncing devices, etc.

Previously, the player output was flickering, unstable when playing MV-HEVC, and I thought it was due to M1 didn't have hardware decoder for it, or 4K Dolby Vision decoding was too demanding for my Mac, but out of luck, I tried retrieving only 1 eye for each frame output during the DisplayLink call, and the flickering is gone. At least that's what I've seen with a 100Hz screen while testing.

Why is the performance improvement so significant? And is there other ways I can improve the performance, and perhaps the energy consumption?

The link to the change I've committed

Why does retrieving the `PixelBuffer` of only one eye improve performance significantly on 2020 Mac mini?
 
 
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