Max 2010 - Performance

Jesse Moody · May 2009

I know there are other threads about this but I needed to see if others are having the same issues.

So we made the switch to 2010 to get all the latest features. I was using Max 9 with all the add ons and service packs up until pretty recently then I switched to 2009. Noticed a slow down from 9 to 2009 and now to 2010 the slow down is insane.

I have an object on screen with 164k tris. That is it and it's chugging. Barely moving around on the screen. Weird thing is it only does it if any object is selected. If nothing is selected then it doesn't slow down.

Any ideas why? Same issues?

dejawolf · May 2009

i had similar problems with vista 64 and 3d studio max 8.
its a vista driver compatibility issue for me. its an error with drawing vectors.
here's a test:

create a line object, with 4-5 lines. copy it 25 times.
does your computer slow down?

Junkie_XL · May 2009

Yep it's not just you. I show a framerate that is twice as bad (or greater) in max 2010 vs max 2008. A 600K scene at 23 FPS shows 11FPS in 2010.

I'm sticking with max 2008 and polyboost I think. Max 9 & 2008 are identical in performance for me.

Jesse Moody · May 2009

Man it's seriously ridiculous how much slower this is. It should be faster. I shouldn't have slow down on a machine with a quad core and 8 gigs of memory. Seriously.

renderhjs · May 2009

a friend told me this tip to disable the screen anit-aliasing in the ini settings which I am about to find. He said that it should boost things up,- another idea would be to disable lots of plugins you never need so that they wont be loaded with the startup, that should boost again.

and no newer versions these days does not mean faster & quicker software - its more of the opposite. Photoshop is a pain in the ass to work with starting with CS3, max has not gotten better in this regards.
On a side note though in some cases complex scenes do navigate smoother- though not always.

renderhjs · May 2009

well I worked my way through the Area threads of autodesk and it seems that by default it is not that easy to disable it (or not possible). THe reason for that is some .NET 4 stuff that does not allow to switch or alter font things - or something like that.

Josef Wienerroither writes:

Josef Wienerroither wrote:

Cleartype in WPF ( the new .Net tools in Max like Ribbon, Sceneexplorer, Application frame and a lot other things) CANNOT be disabled because of a .NET/Microsoft limitation/design decision. The upcoming dot NET 4.0 version will have the option to disable font antaliasing, if this will be backwardscompatible for dot net 3.xx stuff i don’ know though...I think Autodesk chose to enable cleartype in general for Max 2010 to make the UI fonts consistent and not to have Cleartyped fonts mixed with standard “sharp” UI fonts…

But there is a hacky way
http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/24971/#114431

but the general echo in many threads especially this one:
http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/25717/P0/
is that max has become slow and bloated, and many ask for a complete rebirth of the core

but personally performance so far was for me not an issue with max2010 - I was rather pissed at the GUI changes which are butt ugly, slow and absolutely not logical or in other words: shitty designed. Its like they toss the whole GUI foundation over board and try something noobish like glossy web 2.0 styles aimed for idiots.
Like in 2010 the File menu is not readable anymore as File (instead some giant Vista start button alike) and all the commands LACK SHORTCUT DESCRIPTIONS !! - how is someone supposed to know now that ctrl + shift+ s is perhaps save as, or the other shortcuts.
And the Ribbon interface is Garbage as well - its slow not at all responsive, has ugly bloated fade animations for the tooltips and in general a pain to learn because there is no text context or shortcut context. Instead each time I have to remember the icon = its like learning Chinese characters sometimes to me - very very difficult to learn.

I already mentioned the forced blurType stuff (clearType), not only can it only anti- alias now text but often I also see wrong rendered text stuff that then gets bold or looks as if it were rendered twice or 3x on top of each other - and if I then hover over it or refresh the panel its gone.

But every big company seems to like these Funky bloated FX interfaces - even Adobe really went down regarding that matter. Flash CS4 is a disaster to use on notebooks because it sucks to much CPU usage while doing nothing. Why? because they included Flash Players into the Interface that run constantly making your computer slow.
Same shit with Photoshop CS4 which is also a fucking pain to use on decent hardware because it consumes like 200% of the RAM compared to what it actually could use (like Photoshop CS or CS2 without the version cue bloater). Because they decided that viewing 2 documents at once or more using tabs is cool, and having alpha rounded transparency GUI designs is cool as well, or sells the product better if anything else seems to be less progressed.

And Vista Win7 is no different - bloaty icons and performance compared to Win2000 or XP just to sell new Hardware...
I could go on and on the majority of software developers really seem to focus on new target groups that can be easier attracted with visuals instead of functionality.

Frankie V · May 2009

I was having some serious slow down in Motion Builder and Max 2009 but I found that making a custom setting for my Nvidia card solved the problem. I’m running dual monitors if that makes a difference.

kite212 · May 2009

i haven't had too many issues, before when i fist got it i had some chugging, but as newer drivers came out the more stable it has become. i had a 6 million scene and my fps was jumping between 20 -150. right now i have a 258k tri object and my fps is between 170 and 200. and my machine only has 4gig ddr2, 2.6 amd quad and a 4850 512 win7 x64, and i have 2 screens a 22in and a 32in. so i would check vid drivers to make sure they are the latest. my laptop was having a few issues with it but i just updated my drivers for it and its doing better. also a new hotfix came out like 2 weeks ago or so.

edit
i would like to see the ribbon removed though, i dont see why the tools couldnt have just been added into the modify tab, just as many agree on area, its time for autodesk to start from the beginning and make a nextgen 3d app, and please make uv unwrap similar to headus

pior · May 2009

Yeah thats the biggest lesson this recent years - never install a newer version 'just to try out the new features'.

Like many stated before, it really doesn't work like that anymore. It is completely ridiculous, but I think the dev teams of monster apps really don't have control over their products anymore. I keep hearing smart people telling me 'oh but your hardware is better, sure the app is a little bit heavier but it should run fine', huh.

Also this likely puts your purchasing dept in a awkward position as the latest version is usually the only one available. This alone (and this is just my opinion) makes warez a truly important resource as this is sometimes the only way to get a stable version of an app EVEN when you just bought the real thing.

Anyways I'm not of much help here, sorry! Good luck man. I know I gave up on this hehe :P

mLichy · May 2009

We used Max 9 at Bungie when I was there last, but now I'm going to be using 2009 I guess. But I've been using 2009 otherwise and like it for the most part. Idk about 2010. I did also notice a slowdown, but I think I have AA turned off which probably helps, and I don't run really any plugins.

Blaizer · May 2009

I'm also using max 2k9 but i have some annoying bugs.

I downloaded the demo for max 2010 and it really has a bad perfomance. The load is slower aswell. The scanline renderer is also slower than never and is something totally weird. Some renders i usually do in ms, in max 2010 are minutes... no jokes, and it's only scanline + catmull rom with super sampler for quality (3 omni lights).

I have had several problems with rigs with max 2009/2010. to use Simmetry for the skin is a super crash with old archives from max 2008. Axis with envelopes got crazy and the handles appears in the next city...

I work with quadro, so in viewports, i didn't notice an spectacular fall of perfomance, 20+fps only (without hardware acceleration)

This is what i call to kill a program.

Frankie V · May 2009

perna wrote: »

So, basically about every other major version should be skipped. Let others file bug reports and tear their hear out and just wait until next year for the issues to be sorted.

Ya but then they got you with the upgrade con. You check out the latest version, decided to give it a pass and then have to pay twice the upgrade price for the version that works the way it should have in the first place.

Unless your lucky to afford the subscription plan.

elte · May 2009

After reading this thread I have a doubt of switching from maya to max, I thought maya 2009 is buggy enough before reading this thread. I'm in doubt switching now.

It's quite true after reading this : http://thnkr.com/b/

Jesse Moody · May 2009

Ok I took an object from 2010 exported obj to max 9. Turbosmoothed both for the high poly and max 9 is steady at like 250-400 fps on screen while 2010 is at like 20

What the hell. Thats insane!

pior · May 2009

By the way. Anyone knows a good way to get older versions of software, legit? For instance CS4 is way too broken, how do you even get a CS2 license then?

CrazyButcher · May 2009

ebay

Toast · May 2009

pior wrote: »

For instance CS4 is way too broken

how so?

pior · May 2009

Well on the two win machines I tested it on it was slower both for menus and brushstrokes (uber x64 machine and 3years old dinosaur aswell).
It felt much more polished on the Mac, but I guess that's much easier to achieve?

Yeah CB that's so annoying ...

Anyways back to the topic of newer Max versions. Earlier this week I was playing with max2009 and it seemed to load my max8 preferences just fine (menus, menu bars, colors, shortcuts) but the next day all shortcuts were back to defaults. Reverting back to the default UI, and then loading my custom settings again still didn't bring the 'cuts back either. Any ideas? That the kind of things that really should work well from one version to another...

System · May 2009

Tried max 2009 but not the 2010 version, did notice a slowdown in general with some functions (edit poly and scanline rendering) except the actual loading time to run the application had improved significantly.

Just wondering when you guys say we just installed 2010 and it's slow, are you just overwriting the old application and keeping the same software on the machine?

For instance when testing max 2009 viewport navigation was alot slower while having a maxtor one touch two connected, once the drive was disconnected and the drivers unloaded the application seemed faster.

I think it's mainly due to incompatiblities with other services, service packs may not help this if your set on using the latest max but a process of elimination might help overcome these problems.

ps: cs4 is great, had no problems with it at all, much faster.

Jesse Moody · May 2009

Oh we are on subscription. I still have Max 9, 2009, and 2010 on my rig.

I have an external hard drive connected so maybe I'll see how that works unhooked.

I'm gonna give 2010 a try here at home on my laptop and then try 2010 on my wifes monster desktop to see if there are any differences.

[Deleted User] · May 2009

I didn't notice any slowdown with 2010 on my machine. Right now I've got a 950k scene and I'm getting around 120 fps rotating the view around. It drops to around 40 if I enable edged faces for everything and to 75 with a sub-object selection, but it doesn't drop below 30 during normal use (just to see, I applied two turbosmooth modifiers to a 1200 poly object, turned on the stack preview, and jerked it around with the shift tool. It dropped to 11.) That's in single view expert mode on a widescreen display with the graphite ribbon floated over to the other monitor. I'm running a quad core with 2GB of DDR2 and a 768MB GeForce 9600 in 32-bit XP Home, so it's weird that it would be so slow on a rig with 4 times as much memory. If it's not the video drivers or something, I blame Vista.

j_bradford · May 2009

I use Max strictly for rendering at work so using 2010 doesn't make much a difference for me. However when I played around with the ribbon it was extremely slow and buggy. There are times when it would crash Max simply by doing a few operations on it. I'm kind of suprised by this release because Autodesk took polyboost, which has a sleek interface and reconfigured it into the ribbon - which never existed before. Why not just integrate everything into the command panel or quad menus? Having the ribbon there on top of the command panel has made the viewport so small now, especially for those that like a 2-column command panel. I hope autodesk chooses to ditch the command panel or ribbon. It's really cluttered to have everything on screen like that.

renderhjs · May 2009

maybe they were to afraid to touch the ancient GUI code to make big changes and instead made something new like the graphite toolbar with cool and fancy effects such as big rollover tooltips.

At the moment I have a scene that I can only render once every session, as soon as I render a 2nd time I get a crash starting at the beginning of the render process. This is kind of sad as it forces me to tweak texture sizes and geometry again in order to be able to render things after each other.

Kimono · May 2009

I've noticed a massive deterioration in performance aswell Jesse, have also become quite accustomed to working on models with the suffix "_recover_recover_recover_recover_recover_recover_recover". I never had access to Polyboost before and the tools seem to be extremely useful so the upgrade has proven to be worthwile in that regard, I am however firmly in the "total rehaul" camp. I would not mind putting the hours in getting to grips with an improved program than spending the same amount of time staring at a slideshow.

Mark Dygert · May 2009

We have it installed at work but we're not switching over until our next project a few months from now. I've played around with it, the only thing that slows me down is the ribbon, it eats up way too much vertical screen space and is a step backward from polyboost functionality wise. Monitors have more horiz space, let me dock it to the left or to the right or better yet float it.

Hopefully there is a way to disable the ribbon and go back to using polyboost. The ribbon MrBlueSummers was working on was much more robust.

Jesse Moody · May 2009

Vig you can undock it and float it. I have it on my 2nd monitor along with other tools.

What killed me is you can't set hot keys for polyboost functions any longer. WTF!!!

renderhjs · May 2009

I found out that if you hit alt + f for the file menu (even though you cant see the underscore f..file because of the Vista alike Button),
and then hold or press alt again some gimmick animation shows the shortcuts to the entries there - quite hidden imo. but still broken to me as you cant see sub stuff like export selected right away.

maybe it works the same with the graphite tools?- will check that later today

almighty_gir · May 2009

running a dual core 3.2Ghz, 4gb ram, Nvidia 9800GTX 512mb system
windows 7 64bit beta
Max 2010 64bit.

i've got nothing but compliments after jumping to this from max 9, it works like a dream by comparrison, i can import meshes from zbrush in about 1/10 the time it would have taken before (i'm talking very dense meshes). i don't get the chug you mention Jesse, i've just opened a wip model, need to build some armour parts over a high res mesh, figured i'd select it, as you say that's when you have problems. then panned it all over the screen, and hit prtscrn to show my fps.

i've also not had a max crash yet either... maybe 2010 was designed with windows 7 in mind over vista, as m$ are jumping to that later this year? dunno... i just don't have any of the problems you guys are having.

[Deleted User] · May 2009

You can still set hotkeys for polyboost functions, they're just listed oddly. They don't show up under the Graphite Modeling Tools category where any logical person would expect to find them, but under the Main UI>All Commands list, all of the PolyDraw functions are now listed as "PolyDraw Drag", "PolyDraw Extend", etc. and the others, like SetFlow, SwiftLoop, and Insert Loop are listed by themselves.

renderhjs · May 2009

fly_soup wrote: »

.... They don't show up under the Graphite Modeling Tools category where any logical person would expect to find them, but under the Main UI>All Commands list, ...

it is the general category is as I believe because you do not have access in maxscript or the macroscript template in which category to store your scripts.
It makes sense then as the "graphite tools" are in fact just scripts added via maxscript. I wish they would tidy that up.

almighty_gir · May 2009

perna wrote: »

almighty_gir: No wonder you're seeing performance improvements, you upgraded from max9 It makes sense to compare 2010 to a more recent version.

that's fair enough dude, but he said he went from max9 to 2009 and had a slow down, then a bigger slowdown from 2009 to 2010. so it would make sense that i should have a slowdown too, right? but i don't.

renderhjs · May 2009

I have like 20 crashes a day with max2010 now simply because it cant handle a certain polycount and subdiv. settings. Though they are not random and regular workflow is not interrupted, rendering is not smooth at all

kite212 · May 2009

i get the most crashes when i try to undo in 2010, ill undo like 5+ steps and bam, and some of the graphite tools brick it

[Deleted User] · May 2009

You say you didn't notice any slowdown - what were you using before?

I was using 9 before too. Yeah, maybe it's not really a fair comparison.

renderhjs · Jun 2009

some of the annoying things in pictures:

like the xth time today:

because rendering fails, and then sometimes not

and then the buggy GUI

Mark Dygert · Jun 2009

Jesse, good to hear you can float it. If my second monitor wasn't full of animation tools I'd probably do that too.

I just figured out how to change the ribbons orientation from horiz to vert and docked it next to the command panel, where I normally look for modeling tools. It can also be toggled so its not always eating up space. I could start to like 2010...

Per, yea I think 2009 is probably 3dsmax at its peak right now, if the choice was mine I'd probably stick with it. Best performance I've seen and most stable build yet.

render, that crash happens to me too. More often with Mental Ray... It can be slightly less annoying if you run the renders through backburner The render errors out but at least it doesn't take 3ds down with it. It's pretty easy to set up locally too, as soon as the job is sent it goes back to 3ds and lets you keep working while its rendering. I added Manager and Sever to start up on boot so they're always there.

kite212 · Jun 2009

having the graphite tools docked to the right is better but i cant collapse it and make it smaller which kinda sux, i also made some extra buttons to change its alignment, and open and close it, and a button to open loop tools

renderhjs · Jun 2009

I got another bug

for some reason a scene with 1.7 million polygons fails saving here,- it crashes and I get a endless loop in which max tells me each time that the file went corrupt and asking if I would like to save a copy but which fails as well and so he keeps asking

I never had that with any prior version of max - but then again i didn't worked before with so many faces. Anyway not nice

renderhjs · Jun 2009

argh I HATE autodesk!
it fucked my last 3 iterations of the file with that error, now I have to redo 1/2 day of work !!!

ironbearxl · Jun 2009

Not all the graphite tools have kb shortcuts, for instance they left out Cap which works very different (ie it's better) from regular Cap.

Edit: Just figured out graphite Cap is actually the same as create poly.

NyneDown · Jun 2009

I downloaded the free trial for work (they're implementing 3d visualizations...finally) and noticed a huge decrease in performance also. The machine I have at work is mean as hell too...the specs are top of the line and still it lags while moving around in the viewports.

If it aint broke...dont fix it. Upgrades are supposed to be for improvements...not 2 steps backwards. Autodesk is really starting to chap my ass.

kite212 · Jun 2009

i feel really bad for you render, seems like autodesk hates you, maybe they are jealous of your uv tools, and how its better than theirs

the only problem ive had with 2010 is bringing my desktops ui over to ma lappy, the buttons i made freaked out and broke my ui, and some times my lappy chugs, but i blame shitty nvidia drivers for win7

renderhjs · Jun 2009

oh well I guess we all have some times were we hate something like a certain OS, drivers or support of a company.
Will see if max2009 works out better for this project -_-

cgFreak · Oct 2009

renderhjs wrote: »

another idea would be to disable lots of plugins you never need so that they wont be loaded with the startup, that should boost again.

.

Please tell me man, how to disable unneeded plug ins. Cos' I've been trying to disable those from the plug in manager but there were no options to unload plug ins'. Please Please Please Please Please Please help me...:poly142:

crozer · Oct 2009

i jumped from max8 to 2010 and didn't notice any differences at the beginning. my modeling and working-progress was doing just fine, until i had to start rendering.
i never had to modify and switch so many options in the rendering parameters, until i started using max2010 and wanted to make any progress rendering

i initially thought my gfx-card was just getting trapped by time and wasn't up for 3d working anymore.

renderhjs · Oct 2009

cgFreak wrote: »

Please tell me man, how to disable unneeded plug ins. Cos' I've been trying to disable those from the plug in manager but there were no options to unload plug ins'. Please Please Please Please Please Please help me...:poly142:

check out:
3ds clean scripts:
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=63739&highlight=3ds+clean

even though its aimed for max2009 you should be able to get out the batch scripts and maxscripts needed to tweak things.

Jorgegs · Nov 2009

I hope to hell Pixologic doesn't get in the bloat bandwagon, because there is not byte of ram I can spare when running zbrush.

I still use Photoshop 5.0, for 99% of my texturing. I just fire up CS2 when for warping or using brushes. I'm basically working in abandonware. (it's from 1998 )

damn emoticons

renderhjs · Nov 2009

he he I told my boss the other day at work to get me Photoshop CS2 because CS4 is so bloated and is impossible to work with (lots of flickering, crashing, hanging up, delays,...).

I wish I could get my hands on Photoshop CS1 (with layer effects + newer brush engine) or max2009 at work (because right now they bought me max2010).

I am scared a little bit about Win7 because there is no single test out there comparing it with winXP and so all the media is hyping is that it is faster as Vista but vista never was a choice for me or any of the companies I worked for so far.
Being able to address more RAM is welcome (win7, 64 bit) but if the next Photoshop CS5 requires just 3 GB as a minimum to work somehow and Win7 itself again some 2 GB it means software developers are getting to sloppy.
Especially autodesk and adobe delivered catastrophic results in this regards, their newest max and Photoshop are the slowest and buggiest apps ever released.

pior · Nov 2009

Render, it's good to hear common sense like that every now and then!
Adobe made it very hard for users to get legit versions of their older software. However I think CS3 will be fine for you, maybe give it a try? CS4 is okay for paintings, but I wouldn't recommend it for editing multiple textures at once ...

renderhjs · Nov 2009

I have different test results with painting in CS4, the tablet FPS is actually a hell lot lower as lets say CS1 or CS2. CS3 was okay but still with a hick up every now and then with painting.

I compared with a friend CS3 and CS4 and CS2 all next to each other with a Wacom intuos 2 - and we noticed a very dramatic difference in the refresh rate of the tablets beeing read in Photoshop.
In photoshop CS4 I can't even draw a curve with the mouse in 1 attempt, it always hangs up and makes a big zig because it was busy initializing some GUI shit when I hold down the mouse and start to drag - its a nightmare - adobe: you fucked up totally!!!

Even the designers at the company hate it especially the openGL stuff (we used that lately with some 3d game project) - because it starts to tween and ease with hick ups every now and then.

somehow related: I totally dig google's recent software (and also web) philosophy making stuff speedy, snappy, lightweight and instant reacting like google chrome, chrome OS or even the google search. They are all super fast compared to their competitors (bing, firefox, IE,...). I wish autodesk and adobe would take a slice from that and rewrite their cores to really bring the fastest core engine and architecture out there so that we can start in a new era of their packages.
Especially max needs a rewrite of the core and Maya needs a real GUI - booth are so ancient in their architecture its almost a shame that they sell it each year as something new - guess thats why they started with the GUI shit to hide the dirt.

argh booth companies make me totally angry

rv_el · Dec 2009

You said it Moody. This has been horrible for us at work. I installed SP1, but not hotfixes. Do those help?

A really really big problem i'm having is basic navigation. Its already hitchy in a lot of ways, but really whats killing me is the middle mouse roll!!!!

the way i work is with a lot of quick pans/rotatearounds/zooms .. i'll zoom out, rotate around fast and look at the silhouette and zoom in and work on something closer up.

I've been using max for ages - i can't descrbie problems in detail, but like riding a bike, you just know when something is off

In 2010 i'll try to work fast but the zoom keeps "hanging" . Its like the entire middle mouse will move its functions over to the modify panel or something. i'll pan and rotate around a model and then try to zoom.. nothing.. try again.. nothing... then i migh pan and try again and it will finally go

most often i have to click in the viewport to get the middle mouse to work again - this makes me lose my selection AND pacing.

Its horrible zooming in, selecting something, hitting a button on the mod panel. Then panning around the model for a quick second, then you go to zoom back out and you just can't. wtfballs!

Am i the only one seeing this?

Also on another note, honestly i've had a lot of issues with new software. CS4 and even ZB 3.5R3 have been some of the hardest transitions with the most work arounds ever!

Max 2010 - Performance

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