Modo with a GTX 1080?

Zack Maxwell

Modo has notoriously horrible performance in certain areas, most notably animation. Deforming, weight painting, etc. On my GTX 780 Ti, it's effectively unusable for all but basic low poly modeling work.
Has anyone tried running it on the new GTX 1080 or 1070? Or at least a Titan X? Is a beastly video card enough to negate Modo's inefficiency?

thomasp

animation, deforming, weight painting - sounds like it's simply slow when you interact with it/when it's dealing with rigs and skinning - are you sure it's GPU related at all? tried different viewport modes to see if performance changes? some programs are just not optimized well and need a faster CPU. a 780 ti should not hold things back unless there's some serious driver issue.

Zack Maxwell

It's certainly not CPU-related. I have a 4ghz quad core with 4 additional virtual cores. Do you not have that issue? Performance in those areas is terrible in tutorial videos I've watched as well.

thomasp

the GPU normally only speeds things up noticeably when you set your viewport to 'fancy' and/or resort to just spinning around the scene. as soon as you interact with the toolset, that's when you're usually strictly CPU limited. so something like weight painting should not benefit at all from a monster GPU  unless modo is written very differently from other apps.

i have only run modo on a mac with integrated GPU, never felt very fast to me but certainly not unusable either. but then it does depend on if current versions are perhaps rather unoptimized in general or your expectations in terms of what constitutes a normal scene it ought to handle are set too high?

anyway, just saying i find it very unlikely that a faster GPU would cure your problems.

Zack Maxwell

It isn't an issue of expectation, since I'm comparing the performance against Maya and Blender.

JedTheKrampus

Seems to me that those tasks would be more likely to be CPU bound than GPU bound. It's probably just a case of poor optimization. Not much you can do about it besides weight paint in another app. CPUs aren't getting hugely faster anytime soon.

@Farfarer It could be a good idea to profile and improve these code paths if you have the chance. It'd also be sweet if you could confirm whether this is CPU or GPU bound. Doesn't affect me much because I rig and animate in Blender, but improving the performance in this area and making viewport perf better across the board would be really nice.

Farfarer

As I understand it, stuff like defomers, weight painting, etc... that's all CPU, so a faster graphics card won't help much there.

Bigger graphics cards will let you generally push around more polys and bigger textures more fluidly in the viewport - especially for stuff like sculpting - but it won't necessarily make animation playback faster. Stuff like AA, SSAO and SSR is less of a burden, too, in the viewport.

Worth noting that we also (generally) see less issues with nVidia cards compared to AMD cards when using the advanced viewport, especially with "consumer" cards.

Honestly, I'm not that involved with or knowledgeable about the rigging/animation side of MODO, so take that with a grain of salt (i.e. YMMV).

repete

you will be told that it's to do with your setup and modo is fine. There is NO WAY that the new GTX cards are going to solve modos performance issues, they are modo issues, nothing more nothing less.  

xXCrimsonWolfXx

Modo has always been a program that has struggled with millions of polygons and working with many of them. It isn't your hardware, it's simply optimization. Modo has never been the best when it's came to it so don't worry about your hardware that much. However I would definitely upgrade your GPU, it's in need of one (however I don't know your economic standpoint). I have a Titan Black, quad core i7 overclocked and 32 gb of ram so it definitely isn't hardware for me either. I can't even use the advanced viewport without instantly hitting 10 fps while tumbling around.