Blender : low viewport performance

SnowInChina

first off, i'am back online
i was moving from dortmund to wolfsburg (germany) for my new job as virtual media developer (thx polycount)

now to my problem
i bought myself a new workstation last year and this is bothering me for quite some time now

blenders viewport seems to get really slow if you are working on something with say 500k+ tris
and it gets really slow above 1 million
object mode is ok, i can freely move without problems, but in editmode its really slow

iam running on a i7 2600k with 16gigs ddr3 ram and a gtx570 2.5gb graphic card, so that shouldnt be a problem

i have similar problems in sculptris, which crashes if i go above 4million tris

i have updated all my driver and other updates and iam using fairly recent builds


any clue ?

ZacD

Laptop or desktop? Have you tried other 3d programs?

respawnrt

Hmm you could try to disable the object outlines, try that and see if it boosts the performance, thou blender was alyways slow with not so big polycounts.And of course you can use wireframe view to pan rotate and zoom but that's hardly a tip...or a fix

kat

Does performance change depending on the which viewport shading mode you're using (Wireframe, solid, textured)?

JamesWild

Newer graphics cards are awful at editing models. They're optimized for smaller batches like you'd find in a game rather than single batches of millions, and expect batches to not change once uploaded. 3DS Max is pretty much unusable on my machine with complex models as there's a 1-2sec hang after any change to a model over about 600ktris while it does whatever processing it does on the batch. On the flipside, I can easily manage 30 million polygon scenes if my meshes are ~20ktris each.

A while back I was working on a project that used polygons generated on the CPU (it required some physics processing, so this was unavoidable) and uploaded them every frame. On the 450GTS, any batch over 512 vertices done like this halved the framerate and consumed a full CPU core! 512 and below worked fine as you'd expect. If I manually broke it up into batches of 512, it worked fine, but how am I supposed to work around this? What if next week it's 384? Do I have to patch my game for every single graphics card out there?

GPU manufacturers are straining for more and more performance, and they're only capable of doing that now by making their GPUs less versatile. It's the beginning of a return to the old days when graphics cards were a minefield of performance killers and invisible but framerate murdering software rendered fallback modes.

I for one would like to see a "tools" mode on modern GPUs that disables all of this premature optimization so they're useful for things over than gaming. Perhaps if software could hint what it is, even.

TNO

hopefully those 7 tips in the first posting help you

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?257323-What-everybody-needs-to-know-about-Blender-Viewport-performance

SnowInChina

kat wrote: »

Does performance change depending on the which viewport shading mode you're using (Wireframe, solid, textured)?

textured & solid mode are around the same, with wireframe mode i get a slight boost, but still not good enough to work on it

SnowInChina

ZacD wrote: »

Laptop or desktop? Have you tried other 3d programs?

desktop
same model runs like a boss in maya (until i enable the smoothing shader)

SnowInChina

TNO wrote: »

hopefully those 7 tips in the first posting help you

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?257323-What-everybody-needs-to-know-about-Blender-Viewport-performance

helped a bit, but still too bad to work with

btw: i copied the mesh something like 15 times in object mode, 15M+ tris, still running relatively smooth

ivanzu

You could hide the rest of the model on which you are not working and turning on optimal display if you are doing subd modelling.

metalliandy

This is something that I have banging my head against a wall about for the past year or so.
Nvidia Fermi cards are pretty slow in all programs that have an OpenGL viewport and to make things worse, VBOs are not supported in Edit mode currently.
There really isn't much you can do aside from using fewer iterations of subsurf in edit mode and making sure that VBOs and Double sided is off for each mesh when in Object mode.