3dsmax Polycount Bottleneck?? 64bit

pixeldamage

THis is frustrating. I have a really high end beast running i7 (8 cores), 6gb ram, geforce XFX 275, Vista 64, Max 2009 x64 and tried with Max 2010 x32+x64

I am getting speeds of 0.3fps when simply taking an object and turbosmooting to anything over 300K polys.

If I take an object at 300,000 polys and try and select polys on it there is a huge delay in seconds that takes place sometimes up to ten seconds.

I notice one of my threads is maxed out and the other seven are doing nothing. Is max threaded on all its parts eg. viewport?

I tried this on my system at home which is pretty much the same system with similar results.

SO! can Max only handle a few hundred thousand polys? I though it could do far more than that.

CrazyButcher

what viewport driver do you use?

pior

Woah that's messed up ... I just made a quick test, very similar conditions (same proc same ram, just an older vidcard) and I am getting 300 fps when panning and rotating. This was done on a temporary xp home install with the max2009...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v242/pior_ubb/fpstest.jpg

Try install an older, more stable OS maybe? Do you really need cluttered-vista?

pixeldamage

I have tried all of the drivers (viewport) but mainly use DirectX9. I tried DX10 but found it was really buggy on mine. I'm using Vista due to XP not having a great 32bit version

pior

Well you could try installing XPhome on another drive, just to try things out (30 days activation thingie)
You could also try to disable Aero.

Good luck

almighty_gir

i have a stable 200fps, on an imported .obj from zbrush clocking in at 800k polies.

max2010, windows7 RC 64bit, 4gb ram, dualcore 3ghz, nvidia 9800gtx 512.

=/

edit: if you're looking at testing an OS, get the 64bit rc of win7, it's free until july next year, and it's awesome.

carlo_c

I'm running vista x64, 4gb ram and a q6600. The other day I had about 5 million polys on screen in max... the viewport was slow but it was working so I don't think it's max. I also use DX9.

I do find sometimes max can get very slow in the viewport with a few hundred thousand polys if I've been working for a while. At that point I just save what I've got, close and reopen max. Seems to be alright after that but it is one of my annoyances with max.

Parnell

Depending on how you are working with the mesh...say you are using the graphite toolset. I've found freezing the high res mesh and then doing topology over the frozen mesh greatly increased FPS for me.
B

Joshua Stubbles

I'm getting 130fps with a 1mil triangle mesh with a much lower spec system
Vista Ultimate x64 | Core2Duo 2.4ghz | GeForce 9800GT (186.18 drivers)

Must be something else wonky you got going in. Vista isn't cluttered or slow...

Check your viewport config preferences. Be sure that you're using D3DXCached meshes.

pixeldamage

Ok guys once again thanks for jumping in to help. Right i've used D3DXCached meshes on and off with no real effect. My stack is edit poly / turbosmooth / edit poly. This is max 2k9 so no graphite tools. Its just as slow with max2010. Also tried the same file at home and it was just as slow. My home machine is the same i7 except with a 260 gtx graphics card.

windows7 sounds awesome but i'm worried about reinstalling everything. again.

I haven't got time to find a hosting site but I could upload the file later for people to try. If you collapse the stack from 3 items to 1 it fixes the problem but I dont want to do this to leave the flexibility of turbosmooth being in the stack. I edit the top Edit Poly (above turbosmooth/editablepoly) and just selecting individual polys takes the FPS below 1. I have even got the polycount down to 5000.

CompanionCube

vista=Lame

pixel damage don't be so afraid of wiping a pc and reinstalling. i do it every 6 months or so just to keep my PC fresh because crap always builds up. its something everyone should be able to do, just put on some music and install away. just always make sure your work is seperate from your system drive.

pixeldamage

CompanionCube wrote: »

vista=Lame

pixel damage don't be so afraid of wiping a pc and reinstalling. i do it every 6 months or so .

YEP! Done it four times this month but i'm more concerned about work time being lost when win7 releases full version in Oct.

I added some stuff to my last post below yours.....

Mechadus

Honestly seems like a vid card problem to me.

Im no expert, but Ive found that lagging display issues always either seem to be the vid card, or the motherboard bus. Generally when your processor gets maxed out it will just crash, but mostly Max doesnt even use more than 2 cores unless your rendering. I have a dual-quad core amd machine at home and it will breeze thru a render that cripples the redraw speed in the viewport. Sounds like you have a nice machine, but something is def not right there. If you have one, maybe try swapping out your vid card for another one just to see if the performance improves. I had a fan burn out on one of my quaddros here at work a while back, and it was doing very similar things because it was overheating. Wish I had an actuall solution for you, but IMHO seems like a video card issue.

-N!

crazyfingers

how many tris is it?

A single poly could have any number of tris, not always the best benchmark.

LEViATHAN

crazyfingers wrote: »

how many tris is it?

A single poly could have any number of tris, not always the best benchmark.

Turbosmooth modifiers output the mesh in quads.

pixeldamage

I found that its nothing really to do with poly/tri count as I got the numbers really low and still suffered issues. The problem seemed to go away when I collapsed the stack.

Setup:

Edit Poly > TurboSmooth > Edit Poly = slow editing (less than 1FPS) when selecting polys.

Collapsed stack or working with first edit poly layer (bottom of stack) fixes speed drop issue.

It doesnt seem to like Turbosmooth being centre of stack at all! Even the stats were way off... i chose first stack EP mod and it said 35k tris then chose top EP mod and it said 15k !! strange. Even weirder when setting Stat options to Total+Sel showing 1 or 2 tris for the only object in the scene and the rest of the tris were in the total column (which makes no sense as there is only one object in my scene)

PS - prob not necessary now but in future where do you guys host files easily hassle-free to share in case i want to upload the file in question?

ceebee

Do people in max usually work in edit poly | turbosmooth | edit poly stacks? I've only tried converting to editable poly -> turbosmooth -> show end result and model off of the cage (kind of annoying though)

I'm new to max from being a maya user :X

dejawolf

i got an I7 as well, and had the exact same issues as you're having with a 9800GT.
i recently swapped to an ATI card. and the issues are gone. i also had an intermittent stutter issue in the viewports when having several splines in the viewport, which is also gone with the ATI card.
i think its a hardware compatibility issue between the I7 and the latest nvidia drivers/cards.
i'm also on vista X64.

Psyk0

I'm sure this is not the same issue i had with older versions, but...are you using instanced / multi id materials by any chance? I'd get major performance drop in the past simply because of that...i have no idea why, but it happenedfrequently, re-applying a default mat always fixed it.

dejawolf is probably right tho.

mikebart

try turning off hyper threading, it gave me a boost with my i7

pixeldamage

Dejawolf - interesting! though worrying as I bought an nvidia card simply on the understanding that traditionally Autodesk products are supposedly much more compatible with them and are "supposed" to have issues with ATI.

Ceebee- No I wouldn't usually use that setup (well not for long) but Edit Poly > Turbosmooth (top) are very common setups. I simply added another EP to the top as I wasn't ready to collapse but wanted to do a simple edit and was just surprised when the FPS went from 400 to <1. Obviously I can get around the issue by saving multiple files and repeatedly collapsing which is good practice anyway but its nice to use the stack for convenience sometimes.

Psyk0 - Yes I came across this a year or so ago. I was wondering why the animation was playing slow in the viewport (really jumpy) and my reset the material editor and everything went smooth! I'm guessing the mat editor eats RAM but it seems odd that it would cause such slow down on modern machines. In the case of this file I literally cut everything else out to tie down the issue (materials / other objects / lights etc) and i'm certain its the stack causing the problem. Why i'm not sure - perhaps Deja is right?

PS- could some of you guys use your knowledge with my boarding (snow) game question? could do with some help! thanks

Autocon

I'm having similar problems with Max 09. Right now I have a quad core, 32 bit vista 4gigs of ram, dual nVidia 8800GT and with only 27 thousand tris in a scene max 2009 starts chugging and dropping frame rate.

I get the bounding box around certain unselected objects that would normally happen if my scene has a million tris in it. Active degredation I believe its called.

In max 2008 I can have 1 million tris no problem but with 09 it chugs to hell. Tried 3DS Clean hoping that would help but get the same results.

pixeldamage

Autocon have you tried collapsing the stack? clearing your material editor? etc. Yes you're talking about Adaptive Degradation and as it starts working after your scene drops below a specific FPS (which you can set) I can tell you're experiencing pretty much the same thing albeit maybe for a different reason. I wonder if anyone else has had issues with 2009 in particular.