Please Help! 3ds max 2010 laggy interface problem

_Shimmer

Hi polycounters,

I tried my best finding something useful for this problem on various board and google search, but i am running out of ideas and maybe somebody experienced the problem before and managed to solve it.

Lately i experience a lag in the editable poly command panel interface. Its irrelevant to the viewport as its the same with a simple cube just drawn or a scene with 27k tris, 2 lights and a few realtime shaders, AO, et all.

When i switch through the subobject levels of any type of geometry it takes about 1-2 seconds to rebuild the interface in the commandpanel. its a bit faster when the tabs are collapsed and usually takes longer when there are more tabs (polys vs border for example).

I have no script running really except of textools and gomax per occasion (gomax has an auto update script in startup though)

I saw this a few times on vista machine, hence blamed vista for it but i saw it work on vista much faster as well so its not really relevant i think (however no such experiences with win xp)

I am using max 2010 sp 1 with win7 64bit, 4gb ram, and a quadcore. win is installed on same harddrive as max. I have no recollection of when it was not like this except times before win 7.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!

mortalhuman

I wonder if this has anything to do with the window composite in 7? (same thing that makes in-game screen shots black) - I wish I could give more info, or how to disable it, maybe I will remind someone else to elaborate.

SpeCter

That shouldn´t be a problem, i have it enabled(if we talk about the same thing) and i don´t have that kind of problems with a similar system

DarthNater

2010 works fine for me in 7, but I have the same issue your having when I try and use it in XP. I tried using the 3DSCLean but it doesn't help. I've disabled all plug-in's I don't use and tried all the fixes I found in the older thread about 2010... I gave up the fight and went back to 2009 on XP.

Sorry I wasn't much help, but if you find a fix please let us know!

Ryno

I take it you're running Direct3D and not OpenGL drivers? Have you updated to the latest DirectX?

cman2k

I have seen this problem first-hand as well, and I'd really like to hear about any possible solutions. I have co-workers who struggle with this daily, but I don't. This is with 3dsmax 2009 and with vista & 7 btw, so I don't think it's specific to 2010 or windows 7.

We have tried enabling/disabling the aero/glass interface of windows with no real changes.

_Shimmer

ah yeah no aero for windows

and latest Direct X, hmm i dont know actually which version i am running atm, 3ds max is set to directx 9 though. I give it a whirl with the latest directx.

Ok tried installing the latest direct x (jun 2010), oddly enough i culdnt get the webinstaller to run (dialog with non usable error massage) and installed redist. that is also weird because its directx9 (?!).

Ahrm an latest direct x seemed to kill viewport shadows for me.

However i tried OpenGl and its still the same.

Mark Dygert

It might be the graphite modeling toolbar updating the ribbon UI. All through 2010 I would lag like crazy when switching modes in edit poly (edge, vert, poly ect) turns out it was the "dynamic" loading of crap in and out of GMT that slowing things down. So I started leaving it off, making GMT almost useless because when launching it for the first time, it would take 10-15-30 seconds to load. Total horse shit, I would literally pause for a second, think "do I really need to do that with GMT or can I take a little longer and do it manually?" then decide yea manuals a bitch and wait 3 decades while it loaded, then wonder if that really saved any time. Oh the days when polyboost was simple, ugly and no one cared because it did its fucking job like Russian cosmonaut rock star. Since I do more animating than modeling these days I don't even see a reason to turn it on.

The horrible part of GMT was and still is if you exit some of the tools improperly (right click instead of deactivate the button) they cause some kind of performance sucking black hole inside the most delicate parts of your machine. The good news is it doesn't do much other than slow max down, ultimately leading to a crash, if you don't close it out of disgust first...

So far we've been told "oh we're working on it, our interface is a work in progress, we'll get it working eventually. Sometimes our house gets dirty while we remodel"

Well, 2 years and the contractor is still sitting on my couch, drinking my beer, watching my porn, feeding my dog expired meat products from my fridge he unplugged 3 months ago. I'm not asking for a miracle, I'm just asking to have back the functionality I had before they decided it was a good idea to ass rape polyboost. You know that little thing they keep promising but never deliver, instead we get new half baked ideas... that will be ignored and forgotten and ultimate culled in future XBR-diets... awesome.

kenpimentel

Thinks that might cause a problem:
- wrong version of .net, you should try reinstalling 3.5 and if you're feeling brave, 4.0 - which is found to be faster, but we don't officially support it at this time
- Wacom tablets have caused a problem (recently someone reported this)
- Intellimouse drivers have caused a problem (historically, not recently)
- Latest McAfee andtivirus is causing a problem (multiple people have reported this)
- Big problems with ATI drivers in the last 6 months, but should be fixed if you get the latest ones
- Aero with max 2010/2011

Mark Dygert

I apologize for hi-jacking this thread... but...

kenpimentel wrote: »

Thinks that might cause a problem:
- wrong version of .net, you should try reinstalling 3.5 and if you're feeling brave, 4.0 - which is found to be faster, but we don't officially support it at this time

I've tried reinstalling 3.5 and when that didn't seem to change anything I installed 4.0. When that didn't work I had to reformat to get back to 3.5. This was a few months ago on Vista 32bit and a weird case but be careful with this. Even restore points where hosed. Now that I'm on Win7 64bit with a higher than average system (according to autodesks survey thing) GMT still lags.

kenpimentel wrote: »

- Wacom tablets have caused a problem (recently someone reported this)
- Latest McAfee andtivirus is causing a problem (multiple people have reported this)
- Big problems with ATI drivers in the last 6 months, but should be fixed if you get the latest ones

I experienced the GMT lag on my new system for a few days before I installed my tablet. Now that its installed, the lag persists.
When doesn't anti-virus cause problems...
I've been on Nvidia for a long time.

kenpimentel wrote: »

- Aero with max 2010/2011

I remember the Aero problems popping up in 2008 and 2009 but I think a hotfix was released that would disable it while max was running, which caused all kinds of problems with other apps, specifically photoshop. Which still exists if you disable Aero... Either way I just disabled it, and lag still exists in GMT.

Oddly using the old polyboost interface with 2009 its still silky smooth, oh and it doesn't take up a giant portion of the screen or take 15-20sec to load. I don't think anyone envisioned the ribbon when it was rumored that polyboost was to be integrated into 3dsmax. I think everyone thought since there is so much cross over and duplication, that edit poly would get an upgrade/house cleaning.

kenpimentel

We are looking at performance issues around the Ribbon and have some ideas to address it. Your case seems abnormal as most users are not experiencing delays on that order of magnitude. I can imagine why it would suck. There must be some other dependency that you haven't discovered.

Mark Dygert

I should be more clear, the typical lag is anywhere from < 1sec up to 2-5sec when switching between modes in edit poly (vert, edge, poly ect) which is still mildly irritating, especially when I switch modes using a shortcut and my mouse is hovering over the button waiting for it to appear. Others who navigate with the mouse might find that an acceptable amount of time that fits inside the travel time, however the elimination of that travel time is why I use the shortcuts...

The 10-15-30 second lag happens when GMT launches for the first time or hasn't been active for a while. I had a script open and close it when max launched but now I just leave it off which is fine because I animate more than I model now, but if other people who use the tools experience the problem my solution to ignore the tool is probably not a good option...

As for the resource eating buttons I was talking about the freeform and paint style tools. It never fails if I have push/pull active and don't deactivate it by clicking the button it will crash after a while.

There are half a dozen scripts that I have installed but I'm not sure if any of them would cause issues because while they are installed, they don't run unless they are triggered. Still I should probably test with a vanilla install just to be sure, if I was that adventurous... but these are scripts necessary to doing my job and some of them are not authored by me and are .mse and can't be changed.

As for other dependancies I'm not exactly sure what you mean, I think that means other outside apps that might be running causing a problem? Thats possible, as I work I'm in and out of 3-5 apps on a given day but I've had the switching lag with none of them running and on days I haven't launched any of them.

If its another component of windows that's causing it, that isn't up to me to find and fix...

_Shimmer

Hi Ken,

thanks for chiming in.
Unfortunately none of your tips worked (for now).
I installed .net 4 and its the same. I put max on AVG exception list. nvidia drivers latest (Geforce 8 Series), all the same. no intellimouse

Superstrange i think is Edit Mesh works as it should, super quick switching between levels and no ui rebuilding.

How can i find out if the wacom driver causes it?

SpeCter

Try unplugging your wacom device, but i doubt it will work.

Gooner442

I've had problems before with Max and WIn 7, there is some advice in the thread I started on CGtalk. In the end I bought a new Quadro graphic card, that actually didn't change anything but then I formatted my computer and reinstalled WIn 7 and only the programs I needed, Max is running well now.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=6&t=909181

_Shimmer

thanks gooner for the heads up.
Unfortunately deleting the viewcube didnt help. however i hate it anyway so its gone for good now but the problem still remains.

@Vig: GMT work fine, they lag per standard but i am actually talking about the Edit poly command pannel on your right side, the grey menu that is there since max 3 and now behvels oddly?!

In the course of finding the bug and so forth now some of my buttons dont work correctly anymore, for example the button to mirror the UVs in the UV editor only does work when i click hold and choose the same action from the dropdown rather than just cliking it. I have no idea how that happend.

So far the only "solution" seems to be to install max 2011, I feel extremely tempted to torrent away if thats the only answer, then again i saw 2011 and the interface seemed generally more clunky making all efforts of trying to get a better max useless.

Super annoyed by this especial since i saw it on so many machines, expecting there is some trouble shoot catalogue.

I thinking about switching back to max 9, however i am forced to work with the newest max in schools to teach so it would be still nice to know how to get a smooth max running... waiting 2 seconds between levels switch is an insane amount of time wasted on me, making me insane infront of class.

Eric Chadwick

Not sure if this was mentioned, but do you have anything above the Editable Poly in your modifier stack? Also sounds like it could be a setting in EP itself. Is Preview Selection turned on? Or anything dynamically-updated like Preserve UVs...

_Shimmer

no modfiers ontop. as said i can jsut drop in a freshly made cube, convert to edit poly and the commandpanel becomes laggy.

i also noticed in the material editor, most of the time its menus that have the expandable tabs but its especially bad with edit poly.

maybe i need more ram but it seems to be a random bug caused by hardware configuration.

Whats Preview Selection?

kenpimentel

Some people have reported issues when also running Photoshop CS4 and CS5. Can you try and see if closing photoshop makes any difference?

_Shimmer

doesnt matter, i can start the pc afresh, no programs running like CS 3 or ZB and its still the same.

I realize now nearly all rollouts are affected by this. for example in the animation tab as well.

To make it perfectly clear, i am keen to run a smooth system, no whislte and bells and shiny. As lean as possible no bloaty stuff. So i tested without all programs running and diffrent configurations as well. The drain in ram and performance for the idlig system is brought to minimum (as much as i can as somewhat informed end-user).

Outside the box, Any interference with something running in the tray reported?
I have avg, java, dropbox and open office at startup but thats about it.
Maybe a new windows service?

Is there some auto Ui update running through the banks causing this?

Maybe like Photoshop its better to install max to another harddrive than windows?

Eric Chadwick

Sounds like a Windows UI setting then. I would take a deep look at the Windows UI prefs.

Irreal

I had terrible slowdown with max 2010 at work. After looking at various solutions I did the following things which gave me a workable speed.

1: Turned off Graphshite Tools. I was getting the same 2-3 interface refresh.
2: Turn off View cube
3: Switched to Open GL as my wireframe DirectX was running at around 5-7fps

_Shimmer

is there a way to permantly shut down GMT?
the scripts are being loaded still if you open max and have no gmt interface (still command panel being laggy with gmt disabled via max/tools/gmt ).

I saw there is an option to enable and disable command panel in the GMT toolbar, im somewhat tempted to blame this feature. maybe some cheap hack causing the ui to restore all the time at certain machines, who knows.

OpenGl didnt change anything except shaders not running correctly

running out of ideas, keep em coming

Mark Dygert

_Shimmer wrote: »

I saw there is an option to enable and disable command panel in the GMT toolbar, im somewhat tempted to blame this feature. maybe some cheap hack causing the ui to restore all the time at certain machines, who knows.

As far as I know there isn't away to uninstall the ribbon or permanently disable GMT.

If you have GMT open when you close 3dsmax it will launch when you open it next.

Ace-Angel

For me they all worked fine. Max 2009 is the fastest and Max 2012 is the second fastest, Max 2011 is slowest.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_VvPR728TM[/ame]

Youtube doubled the speed of my video for some reason...no idea why.

EDIT: Oops, late, seems you already fixed the problem, and yes, Max doesn't like Web-Browsers...I suggest starting Max first, waiting a few minutes for it to cache the meshes and then start using the net.

SpeCter

Whoa that´s heavy. Never had such problems with Win7(64 bit) and max2008/2009/2010.
My Specs are almost similar:
Intel E6600 and hd4870(which is even worse for the fact that it´s dual core and ati).
Your Viewport is lagging behind and the ui needs forever to refresh, i´ve never experienced that before.The only thing i have is the refreshing UI but it´s nowhere that slow.

Edit: I have Chrome open all the time with many tabs, so that can´t be the only problem.

Ace-Angel

There simply too many variables that Autodesk hasn't addressed. For example, making sure all the fancy settings like Flick on your Wacom are disabled, and in my case, shut down Firefox, start Max and restart Firefox?

BlueTooth is also not welcome in my case as it increases the boot time of Max. I had all these problems a few months ago, after going through Google on threads after threads of issue.

SpeCter

What´s the deal with Bluetooth anyway? The only things it really does well is missbehave and sucking your batteries dry(on mobile devices)

Ace-Angel

No idea, but I have it disabled. The annoying part is I had to disable it via Services in Control Panel and cannot enable it again. I must reinstall it again, everytime I need to use it, but it improved stability of Max for me.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, here are the files I removed from both Max 2011 and 2012 respectively to get it up and running faster and made sure they wouldn't keep on crashing every nanosecond:

2011 - 61 files:

3dsexp.dle
3dsimp.dli
adobet1.dlf
Apollo.flt
Apollo3.dlv
auctrl.dlc
AutoCamMax.gup
AutoCamResENU.dll
block.dlc
cin.bmi
crowd.dlo
DLsrr.dlu
Doors.dlo
DwfExport.dle
dwgexp.dle
dwgimp.dly
fenest.dlo
FireEffect.dlr
FltExport.dle
FltGUP.gup
FltImport.dli
HSDS.dlm
igesexp.dle
igesimp.dli
InventorImport.dli
JSR184Exporter.gup
JSR184ExporterRes.dll
landform.dlo
LandXML2Max.dli
LandXML2MaxRes.dll
linktmctrl.dlc
ls2max.dli
lstess.dlm
MACFileIO.dlu
maplink.dly
max2lp.cty
max2lp.dle
orientation.dlo
orientationrc.str
pathflw.dlo
pathflwrc.str
PointCache.dlm
railing.dlo
repel.dlo
repelrc.str
seek.dlo
seekrc.str
speedvar.dlo
speedvarrc.str
STL.DLM
surfacearrive.dlo
surfacearriverc.str
surfaceflw.dlo
surfaceflwrc.str
vizwall.dlo
wallseek.dlo
wallseekrc.str
wander.dlo
wanderrc.str
wsm.dlo
wsmrc.str

2012 -59 files:

3dsexp.dle
3dsimp.dli
adobet1.dlf
Apollo.flt
Apollo3.dlv
auctrl.dlc
AutoCamMax.gup
AutoCamResENU.dll
block.dlc
cin.bmi
crowd.dlo
DLsrr.dlu
Doors.dlo
DwfExport.dle
dwgexp.dle
DwgImp.dli
fenest.dlo
FireEffect.dlr
FltGUP.gup
FltImport.dli
HSDS.dlm
igesimp.dli
InventorImport.dli
JSR184Exporter.gup
JSR184ExporterRes.dll
landform.dlo
LandXML2Max.dli
LandXML2MaxRes.dll
linktmctrl.dlc
ls2max.dli
lstess.dlm
MACFileIO.dlu
MapLink.dfl
max2lp.cty
max2lp.dle
orientation.dlo
orientationrc.str
pathflw.dlo
pathflwrc.str
PointCache.dlm
railing.dlo
repel.dlo
repelrc.str
seek.dlo
seekrc.str
speedvar.dlo
speedvarrc.str
STL.DLM
surfacearrive.dlo
surfacearriverc.str
surfaceflw.dlo
surfaceflwrc.str
vizwall.dlo
wallseek.dlo
wallseekrc.str
wander.dlo
wanderrc.str
wsm.dlo
wsmrc.str

SpeCter

You know who made 3dsclean right Ace? I think he did something like that already

Ace-Angel

Yeah, I know, don't worry, I'm not trying to take credit, just a heads up. Removing certain things in Max 2011 and 2012 caused it crash as opposed to Max 2009, so incase Perna wants to update in the future his little batch file, this could help him get started, I mean you can already see Max 2012 is missing 3 files in STDplugins by default, and in 2011, removing the Reactor stuff didn't work, although that could be because I had PhysX installed.

Ruz

I fixed this by accident as I was having problems with choppiness in UDK so I turned off Aero in windows 7. So that works fine for UDK, but then I got the problem with edit poly in max.
I turn aero back on and choose one of the fancy transparent themes and lo and behold, the problem in max in fixed.
Perhaps later versions of max have been designed to work better with aero, or it could be a just a coincidence.
can someone else give this a try?

Amslon

I've been having exactly the problems described with a flickering UI. I'm running Max 2012 SP1 on Win7 x64 with a quadro card.

Turns out that disabling Nvidia Nview desktop manager has made my UI work properly again!

Hope this helps some other people here.