minimal scene in max, very low FPS

adam

Hey hey,

I'm working on a scene @ work thats roughly 40k triangle in max. There's around 10 materials in the scene, one of which is a multi-sub with about 20 other materials in side of it.

Some other materials on objects are attached, but not setup in the material editor.

When viewing the scene, I am getting ~2 frames per second in the Max viewport.

Any idea what may be causing this? Are there steps to take to narrow the cause down?

Thanks!

JordanW

are you using vista?

kio

is your material editor open? sometimes my max gets real slow while it's active.. probably due to some dx realtime shaders, dont know exactly.

renderhjs

- try the default lighting (ctrl+L)
- chage the texture size of your GFX card,- depending on your hardware
- if nothing works go with flat viewport mode (helped me in a very complex project where everything was texturized)

Mark Dygert

Sometimes its the calculation for the shading that causes some slow down. To check and see, highlight everything, right click go to object properties, and next to vertex color turn off "shaded".
It will look the same as turning on 100% self Illum, but will drop some of the calculations. It really doesn't do much to improve speed on non-complex objects.

Make sure you're viewport shading is set to good or off.
Right click > viewport lighting and Shadows > Viewport Shading.

But first go make sure "Use Cached D3DXMeshes" is checked on.
Customize > Preferences > Viewport Tab > Configure Driver.

erik!

Vig wrote: »

Also make sure in Use Cached D3DXMeshes is turned on
Customize > Preferences > Viewport Tab > Configure Driver.

What does this do?

danr

tried turning the viewport stats off? We tracked some unexplained slowdown at work to that, but still couldn't explain it

Mark Dygert

erik! wrote: »

What does this do?

"When on, enables 3ds Max to use custom driver code to render smoothly shaded objects. Typically this is much faster than using standard Direct3D code, but has an effect only when the driver has hardware-specific custom code. Default=on."

Its one of those nice little features they added to help speed up 3dsmax. For me its a difference of +5-15fps. Every little bit helps. I should have mentioned to make sure that is turned on before going and monkey'ing with the other shading options.

I think it requires a restart of 3dsmax if you change it...

MoP

I've always found that multi/sub-obj materials are a surefire way to kill viewport FPS when using the Cached DX meshes option.
Remember that each extra material on a single object is effectively a new batch, and I think the DX Meshes option isn't optimised for dealing with lots of separate materials on the same object. It might not even deal very well with just displaying lots of different materials all at once.
Might be worth trying to turn that off.

Note: using Cached DX meshes DRASTICALLY increases viewport performance when dealing with very high-poly objects. As long as they only have a few materials.

adam

Disabling "Use Cached D3DXMeshes" increased my FPS to 20-30FPS depending on where I'm looking.

Still have a high number of materials (higher than I originally thought) but this is way better.

Thanks!