Zbrush - Is subdivision with mask slow for anyone else?

cromadbomber

So I am subdiving a mesh with cca. 5mil polygons and I have masked like 99% of the mesh and I left somes part unmasked where I want to engrave some details and letters in order to gain more resolution. Now this by far is slowest operation in Zbrush for me. It takes like around 3 mins to subdivide just a tiny part of unmasked mesh. Is this function really that much computational heavy and do I need a better CPU for this or this is some strange behaviour because even Dynamesh and Decimation master operations take much more less time than this. Usually when I subdivide without any mask from 5 mil to 20 mil polys it takes literally 2 seconds. My CPU is i5-3570k and I have 8 gigs of memory. My CPU is around 40% usage when doing this operation. If its CPU fault I would like for someone to point me which new CPU should I buy for these kind of tasks because I was planning to upgrade my system soon.

cryrid

Local subdivisions have always been intense, especially when Level 0 is already pushing several million polygons. Probably because unlike straight up subdivision, local subdivision has to try and make the topology flow into the remaining 99% of the model along whatever crazy outline is specified. Personally I'd rather work with subtools instead, since this will often be far quicker and offer more advantages than local subdivision will.