nDo2 lag

samcole

Hey guys, I've recently been trying to use nDo2 more in my workflow. I have a pretty decent computer. I built it just over a year ago, I have the sandy i5-2500K processor, 16GB of RAM, and a Geforce GTX 550Ti, yet..nDo still lags and crashes often. I don't think its a RAM or processor issue..could it be my GPU not being able to handle the load of nDo? Tax returns are coming soon..so now would be a good time for some advice/thoughts on upgrading my GPU if that is the answer.

Zepic

I have like a billion gigs of ram a bajillion core processor. NDO and DDO just tend to run slow. Look at the beta thread and you'll see a bunch of posts mentioning it. You just kind of have to deal with it, get a feel for how it works. There are a few tricks here and there to help speed things up, but as far as hardware goes, and seeing how you just recently built a computer, I doubt you'd see much of a speed increase.

Edit: Here's a link to the beta thread:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=88529

peanut™

Amazingly, i rebooted in safe mode and made a virus scan of my computer using spyhunter, this may sound ridiculous, but you dont know how much a PC gets infected with malwares and such, i seem to find my browser a little faster, bugs and slowdowns seems to be absents since .

have a look at http://www.enigmasoftware.com/

Fwap

Try disabling OpenGL Drawing, in the preferences.

Ace-Angel

The reason ndo and ddo run soo slow is because they each create a bajillion layers, masks, etc in photoshop, just look at the layer panel to see what I mean, especially for ddo, you have in some cases something like 75 layers for one group, now imagine that repeated 10 times.

Even if you were using PS on it's own and manually created those layers, it would still lag, the only difference is Quixel created plugins that have a simplified interface.

Secondly, which version of PS are you running? In my case, CS6 solved a whole slew of slow down issues for ndo at least, while CS5 would sometimes crash mid sculpt, so while you won't get a miracle jump in performance, it might make the situation abit more stable.

EDIT: Seriously, do people even read what I type?

cptSwing

Yeah ndo is slow (sometimes frustratingly so).. but as Ace said, I don't think there's really much that Quixel can do about it. Minimizing it when not immediately needed makes it a lot more bearable

teddybergsman

Hey Sam!

The key trick to make Photoshop run smoothly when working with nDo2 is zipping -- a best practice is to have all layers but the current one zipped, as this will increase performance immensely. Disabling OpenGL Drawing does improve performance, as suggested by Fwap, but for high-end machines such as yours the increase may be insignificant (zipping may just do the trick). As a footnote, dDo is soon getting a similar zipping system in place, together with a few other major additions to speed things up.

Regarding the crashes, these may be disk related. Photoshop never clears its memory, even if you manually purge it. Nothing eats memory quite like image processing, so even if you have 16 gigs of RAM, these will soon be consumed when working with large documents, meaning PS performance very often boils down to pure hard drive performance. PS will then continue to fill up the drive with virtual memory until filled. A common cause for nDo2 crashing is full scratch disks, leading to seemingly random, mid-process crashes. Thus, restarting PS once in a while will help to avoid bad performance, and making sure the primary scratch disk has plenty of free space will avoid crashes. Having an SSD as your primary scratch disk also significantly improves heavy duty work for Photoshop in general.

On a side note, nDo2 and dDo are essentially lightweight UI shells, letting PS do all the heavy lifting. This means raw processing speed is completely dependant on the performance of Photoshop's scripting engine. In rare cases, the PS scripting engine suddenly starts to perform incredibly slow, even on high-end systems. This random degradation can persist from days to weeks, before resuming normal behavior, and has had me puzzled for years. I very much doubt this is the issue for you though, and would try zipping before anything else!

almighty_gir

Teddy,

the machine i was using to run dDo previously was:
i7 2600k @ 3.2Ghz, (4 cores/8 threads)
16GB Ram @ 1.6Ghz,
AMD 6970 2gb.

the machine i built yesterday, and tested dDo on today is:
i7 3930k @ 3.6Ghz (6 cores/12 threads)
32 GB Ram @ 1.8Ghz
nVidia GTX670 2gb.

dDo lags like a pig in a bear trap when using maps of 4k. both of those machines are high end, the former was only a year old, and the latter is a couple of days old and using (with the exception of the GPU) the best hardware out there. I've been testing on photoshop CS6.

i have a hard time believing that photoshop can spontaneously catch a case of the flu and under perform for x amount of time and then bounce back... that just defies computational logic.

anyway, this is the number 1 reason why i am not purchasing dDo, the tools are certainly useful, and i'd love to say they would speed up my workflow. but in actuality the amount of time i've spent wrestling with it just to get it to run at a decent speed means that it's only slowed me down.

hopefully you'll get it sorted though.

Fingus

In addition to zipping I find that doing a good old Flatten Image once you have finalized certain details helps even more. When I knew that some details were done and I wouldn't need to go back to edit them I saved my document as a new psd file in order to keep the old layer stack in case i need to fix something I missed, and then i merge all the layers and continue working on top of that one again.

For my telescope I did all the detailing in nDo2 and I think the total amount of layers must have been easily over 200. Even zipped that would be enough to bring my system to its knees.

samcole

Thanks for all the tips, and suggestions guys. Sorry I was away all yesterday from my computer so I'm just getting back to you all now.

I was able to purchase CS4's suite at a discounted price back when I was a student right as CS5 was coming out. I don't really have the extra money to upgrade currently. I will try the zipping as I finish with certain layers once I'm happy with them. I will also in the future try to flatten everything when I get to a certain level of detail/progress that I'm happy with. Also instead of just going all willy-nilly into nDo I'm going to try to plan out the normal in gray scale first with just shapes so that way all I have to do is tweak one layer instead of multiples to get the desired effects I want.

So, one part better PS layer management, one part planning...should hopefully equal a better nDo2 experience.