Blender Sculpting Viewport vs ZBrush (not what you expect)

Hello guys,

today I noticed something strange. So far I have always heard Zbrush would be faster than Blender. But when working with 15 million polys in sculpt mode I get no lag in Blender. But in Zbrush I can’t make a single stroke.

So how is that possible? Did Blender change anything in it’s performance recently? Because originally I switched to Zbrush because Blenders performance was so bad a few months ago.

Are there any experienced zbrush users who noticed this as well?

Thanks in advance guys.

sorry for late reply, but zbrush wont have any trouble handeling 15 mill polygons, however there are some things you might have done to get the lag.

it is most likely dynamic subdivision surface, which will try to subdivide ur model in real time, even while sculpting. this causes INTENSE lag while sculpting. its designed to work with with crease, and zmodeller.

the way you enable dynamic subdivision is by simply pressing D.

however, if you press CTRL+D, then dynamic subdivision wont be enabled by pressing D. and if you do Shift D to go down in subdivision, and press D again, you will simply go 1 division higher… blaah, zbrush you make things complicated to explain…

try to understand what i just said, but if you cant be bothered, here is the dumbed down version.


you see that orange [Dynamic] button? turn that off. and NEVER EVER turn it on unless ur using Zmodeller.

i suggest you go to Preference > Config > Enable Costomize then while holding down CTRL+Alt you simply drag that [Dynamic] button and place it next to Total Poly Count, or anywhere else you prefer. just so its always visable on screen.

that way you will see if its enabled.

for my sculpt work really bad in blender because VBO is disable automatically with multiresolution modifier, i need to apply multires to get back vbos and work fine

@finalbarrage, yeah I disabled that already but thanks for the help anyway. With dynamic subdiv on it’s totally impossible to make a single stroke.

@enzor, I have VBO enabled and Blender works just fine, also while doing sculpt strokes

in object mode i have this, vbo in graphic card


in sculpt mode i have this, no more vbos and slow down UI, i can control this behavior?


images unavailable.

so you are saying you still get lag in zbrush even though dynamic subdiv is turned off? i made 2 subtools with 15m polys total, and navigating in the viewport was as smooth as expected, and brushstrokes were butter smooth aswell.

@finalbarrage When I have 2 subtools, one with 10 million and one with 20 million it still works but I see some slowing down in my brushstrokes already, but transposing that subtool is really laggy.

@Rushlord: What are your computer hardware specs?

I have an i7 2600k, 16gig ram, gtx 1080, ssd 320gb

I May ne wrong, but It seems t’ha you have a very good GPU i And an old processor. Zbrush doesn’t use the GPU at all and it only relies on CPU and RAM. While (I Guess) Blender uses the GPU in the viewport , and the 1080 is One of the best around at the moment. This could partially explain what you are experiencing. Also if you are using 32 bit zbrush and a slow hdd , you are Just using 4gb of RAM and disk swapping

Thanks rbancone. But I am using the 64bit version and a SSD, so no slow HDD. That can’t be the reason. But Blender as far as I know is using the CPU for computing brushstrokes on the mesh. Only rotation and navigation around the model should be faster with the GPU, but the brushstrokes are also smoother.

I guess it is not really a problem since I didn’t reach that many polygons yet…but on the other hand it should be no problem. So my confusion remains. Nevermind.

I know this is old AF, but…
For me nowadays:
Blender = way better viewport performance, not so good stroke performance in heavy meshes
Zbrush = Shit viewport performance despite polycount, flawless stroke performance in almost everything u wanna work in.
Have no way around it and is so annoying. Wish I could just stick to one of them, preferably Blender