Maya with Vista, crashing on high-poly meshes (500k+)

bugo

Hey guys, i´ve update to vista x64 from xp x64, i didnt have any problems with meshes above 1 million, it was slow ofcourse, but maya didnt crash. Now with Vista, selecting a mesh with 500k tris or above it crashes maya, and I cant do anything with it until i delete the mesh selecting on outliner. Any ideas why this thing happens?

MoP

Does it still crash if you put the viewport into Bounding Box display (or maybe Wireframe), then select the mesh?

On my install of XP 64-bit, Maya 2008 (no extensions) crashes when I select a mesh of around 1+ million triangles.

Maybe it's a driver issue?

bugo

when i was at xp x64 it wasnt crashing at all, strange, inst it?
yeah, who knows, maybe its a driver issue. I will try selecting in wireframe.

Thanks MoP

breakneck

can you post if that fixed the problem. it does it to me too (Maya 2008 on Vistax64)

bugo

well, i couldnt fix it yet, really, selecting wireframe it crashes as well.

MM

at work i am running maya 2008 extension 2 64 bit on vista enterprise 64bit and can import around 4 mil poly and bake normals also. can navigate and see wireframes too.

i have 4gb ram on that machine and intel quad core 2.8 ghz

i also assigned a separate hdd for virtual ram which is more necessary for photoshop but may be it helps maya too.

bugo

strange MM, i have the same computer, same ghz and ram, any specific driver setup you are making? could you take a screenshot of nvidia control panel settings for us?

EDIT: also if you can, please send us the number of your vga and driver.

MoP

I think the important thing to know here is what graphics card you're using, MM.
In my experience, more RAM doesn't actually make Maya any more stable when it comes to viewport issues. I've tried importing the same 2-million triangle model on various machines (Vista, XP, 64-bit, 32-bit, some with 2gb RAM, some with 4gb RAM, some Athlon, some Intel) and in most cases Maya will crash when you try to select the 2-million triangle mesh. It usually imports fine, and you can pan round in the viewport, but as soon as you select it, there's a crash.

If we can find out what graphics card you're using, and the driver version, that would be a lot of help. Maybe we can all have a stable Maya

Out of interest, what sort of viewport speeds do you get with a 4 million triangle model on your machine? I get about 5-10 FPS with a 2 million triangle model on a similar machine (dual core instead though).
In 3dsMax I usually get 50+ FPS on 4 million triangle meshes.

MM

i am pretty sure its not just the graphics card. there has been significant increase in high poly performance in maya 2008 64bit version. at home i have imported ~7 mil poly without crashing and could select it (i will post screenshot later) and rendered a model with miss_fast skin shader with polycount around ~3 mil (link to render: http://www.fx81.com/FREELANCE/T_ToyHead4.jpg).

but in maya 7 in the same pc i cant go above 1.5 mil poly so you can see the performance increase.
my spec at home is win xp64, Q6600 @ 3 ghz, 8gb ram, 8800 gtx 768 ram

here is what i have at work

breakneck

i don't mean to hijack the tread but to jump on the band wagon . . . .
i have a quad 2.66 ghz - 4g ram - nvidia 9800 gtx+ with latest drivers - and i'm getting the crashing issue as well on a mesh that is around 850k tris. don't know the frame rate, i'm not currently at my computer.

had the problem with a smaller mesh but it was fixed by deleting the history.

MM

here is the screen from my work machine:



3.1 mil cube exported from mudbox and doing a simple vertex transform with soft selection on, i will say that its quite laggy to manipulate that 3 mil cube. it took around 20 sec to execute that transformation. but it doesnt crash.

at my home pc i can do roughly twice the amount and only difference is xp64 instead of vista64, 8800gtx 768 instead of 8800gt 512 and 8gb ram instead of 4gb ram.

MoP

Cool, thanks for the info.

I have a feeling it could be mainly the video card, since I've only tried on machines with NVidia 7800 GTX cards in, haven't tried on an 8800 or 9800 yet. I will try that out.

The viewport is fine with a 1.5million triangle model composed of many individual parts all with polySmooth applied, but the crashes seem to occur when I have a single, very dense object, imported as an OBJ from ZBrush.

I will see if there's a difference when I make a cube in Maya and subdivide it to 2 million triangles. Maybe that's it too.

MM

that 3 mil cube is imported as one object from mudbox. and in maya as far as i experienced it is lot faster to import a solid mesh that is 4 mil rather than a multi-object that equals to 4 mil. also, when u combine multiple object onto one performance increases since it has less transform nodes.

btw, keep in mind that polycount both in mudbox and zbrush is in face count and not tri count. which means a 2mil cube in mud or zbrush = 4 mil triangles.

Spinks

i decided to max out my newly installed RAM with maya 2009, maybe it'll help isolating the problem. one mudbox cube of 3.1 mil was fine selecting and manipulating.


at this point my system got a bit unstable and i had to reboot

i'm on Vista x64, 6 gigs of ram, 8800 gts 640 mb with the 180 beta drivers.

edit: curiously enough if i try to subdivide a cube above 50k or so in maya i get a opengl driver error, but that may be due to the beta drivers

MM

i went close to 50 mil without crashing at my home pc but it was really really laggy and unstable. my memory usage was around 7gb with very little mem left for the OS and other tasks. if i had more memory i would be able to go higher i think. posting screenshot and specs.

15 x ~3 mil poly cube = ~47 mil

breakneck

this shouldn't be happening right?



just a cylinder w/ mesh smooth
maya 2008
-upsetting. . . .

MM

yea thats bad. with you spec you should be able to import at least a 2+ mil mesh.

one thing i noticed that all brand computers and these ibuypower and alienware etc arent really as fast as their spec suggests while the price is higher. i never trusted their specification.

the best thing is to build your own machine with retail hardware, that way you get the best performance.

Toast

I've been able to select 3 to 4 million polys as well. Maya slows to a crawl but it shouldn't crash.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=9683256

These are the recommended specs. Get a Quadro and Maya will fly.

bugo

Yes, thats the exactly the samething im getting breakneck. I am also no sure if its vga problem, because I used this vga into xp x64 and anything happened. I´m more certain that is a driver problem or setting.

MoP

Toast: Also, get a Quadro and wave goodbye to decent compatibility with nearly every other consumer product (especially games). A lot of them really don't run well.

MM

MoP wrote: »

Toast: Also, get a Quadro and wave goodbye to decent compatibility with nearly every other consumer product (especially games). A lot of them really don't run well.

yes

another thing i wanted to mention, i usually setup a separate hard drive(it has to be a separate physical HDD and not just a partition) for windows page file.
its a must for photoshop scratch disk and it also helps with other tools.

bugo

Ow, me too MM, i separated 20gb and still doesnt work, i will try your nvidia settings and i will come back to tell if it works or not.

Toast

MoP wrote: »

Toast: Also, get a Quadro and wave goodbye to decent compatibility with nearly every other consumer product (especially games). A lot of them really don't run well.

It's a double edged sword 'aint it!

breakneck

Toast wrote: »

These are the recommended specs. Get a Quadro and Maya will fly.

a card that cost more than my whole rig - i sure hope it would make maya work!!

breakneck

did another test tonight just messin around. simply polyCubes smoothed to either 700k or 3million tris





no crash - which i wasn't expecting.
12.5 mil tris onscreen . . .i don't get it.

MoP

Toast wrote: »

It's a double edged sword 'aint it!

Yep, and a pointless one, given that 3dsmax can push 10 million triangles (zbrush/mudbox raw data or subdivided polys) at 30fps on my 2gb, 2.5ghz, 256mb Geforce 7900.

Seems like you need at least double that in RAM and video card power to even hope to get Maya close to that performance, let alone stopping it crashing. It's really disappointing, given how good some of Maya's features are, that the viewport display and dense mesh handling seems so outdated.

Toast

The viewport is outdated I agree, but you have to remember Maya is over 10 years old now.

I just hope Autodesk have a roadmap with a rewrite of Maya's viewport somewhere down the line - although it's probably too mammoth a task.

Oh well, I'll still dream of realtime AO and massive polycounts.

MoP

Toast wrote: »

The viewport is outdated I agree, but you have to remember Maya is over 10 years old now.

I don't really see how that's relevant, the first release of 3D Studio Max was in 1996... it's 12 years old now.

MM

well the main problem is maya only supports opengl while max supports direct3d, software and opengl acceleration. the developers of max suported both game dev and vfx industries while developers of maya havent been paying that much attention to game dev until recently.

Toast

Here's an interesting test, that puts the viewports of XSI, Max and Maya through their paces.

http://www.3dspeedmachine.com/News/compare/compare.htm

XSI smokes Maya and Max when it comes to moving half a million polys.

MoP

FYI, that "benchmark" was commissioned by Softimage, and as detailed in this thread, the tests are very biased and not at all consistent across the three apps. You could even download the scenes and take a look for yourself. The results are actually very different if you set up each app's settings to be as close as possible.

For example some of the scenes were viewed in bounding box mode in XSI while in wireframe in Max/Maya, of course that's going to be faster. Not a balanced overview at all, and I was deeply suspicious of the results when I first read it.

Toast

Nice find. Now you've made me nervous about all those benchmark tests I've seen over the years...