What hardware resources (more/better CPU, RAM, or GPU) should be increased to improve pdf render speeds?
We need to keep on flipping to next-page of pdf at the rate of 10 page/s and the pdfs contain scanned books.
For a research project in human learning and cognition we need to display PDFs to subjects with pages flipping at a speed such that one page of the pdf is displayed for a time of <0.10s.(and we need 36+ instances of such pdf readers running at once).
Best Answer
As Ramhound points out in the his comment, basically all of these will affect it.
PDFs are rendered on the fly, and that's why they are so resource intensive. This high resource use is a trade-off to one of the main points of PDF -- that the file size will be smaller, for easier portability. Since size (emailing them, storing them for a long time, etc.) doesn't seem to be a concern for the task at hand, then using PDFs is probably not a great choice.
Depending on the size and complexity of your PDFs, you may not even be able to get a computer that can render them as fast as you require.
So, trade off CPU and RAM usage for disk usage...
To do this, don't use PDFs; use pre-rendered images of the pages and just flip through those. the files will be significantly larger on disk, but will display much quicker, as no real-time rendering will be needed.
Using a basic 2D graphics engine (many to choose from) you should be able to cobble something together (in the language of your choice) with which you could easily achieve 60FPS, even on "low-end" GPUs.
Alternatively, consider using plain-text instead of PDFs or graphics, as you can EASILY render full pages of text faster even than it can be displayed.