I have a 2 Gb ram DDr dual card thingy and Blender just heats up my laptop like toast. I guess it has something to do with your graphix card (i have some intel hd family thing…pretty noobish im guessing).
I think it would be nice if Blender improved in performance. I just think it takes up a bit too much computer power or whatever you call it.
I’m anticipating that the argument will be that I should upgrade my computer, but I mean, I run Photoshop, After Effects, Sony Vegas, and Flash but Blender is just too heavy on my system.
I think it would be nice if Blender improved in performance. I just think it takes up a bit too much computer power or whatever you call it.
[sarcasm] Yea, about 1/4 of the power of commercial software is waaay to much. [/sarcasm]
All obnoxious responses aside, you really cant even consider a laptop for decent CGI programs. You say you run photoshop and after effects? Think of how complex those programs are compared to blender (amount of tasks to handle at one time). Not very.
If it is just a problem with your laptop heating, get a cooler (or better yet, an actual workstation)
It sounds pretty odd that your computer can’t run Blender well considering it is made to support legacy hardware, if that doesn’t work correctly then there’s yet another reason to discard the old draw code
It heats up your computer while just sitting there or when it’s doing something like rendering a million poly scene?
The first case isn’t so good while the second case is just how computers work due to this little thing called Physics.
Also asking that “Blender improved in performance” is kind of like asking for “peace on earth”, it sounds simple in theory but in actual practice is a bit more complicated.
I think it would be nice if Blender improved in performance. I just think it takes up a bit too much computer power or whatever you call it.
Oh my gosh, what a great idea! Why haven’t the developers thought of that? It seems so obvious now.
Tomorrow, I’ll go to my mechanic’s shop and ask them to make my car go faster. It’s a pretty simple request, so imagine it’ll only cost 5, maybe 10 dollars.
And while we’re at it, why not make MATH easier? It’s hard and it takes too long to do.
It all seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Particularly if you have no brain…
Using a laptop for serious 3D work is like using a car with 1.2 liter engine running at 70 kilowatts to compete in a drifting competition.
Laptops are ok for simple quick things, and I use my blender and gimp on laptop too.
But laptops have so many disadvantages. They have very weak power supply units, small and under-performing motherboards with almost no further expansion possibility, you are usually stuck with 2 or at best 4 ram slots, terrible graphics chip, and a mobile low-power-consumption CPU.
There are laptops that are quite decent actually, but for what you pay for them, you can get twice better specification desktop.
Haha no way After Effects will run on your system like that. What are you doing? Image slideshows? After Effects takes up to 16GB and more when you’re working on a project…
+1 Improve Performance button.
That would be a nice easter egg :).
As opposed to the somewhat ironic answers posted so far (and misreading your original intent as well): what you are saying is that Blender is taking up too much of your laptop’s performance, while other apps do not.
My response: the other applications do not make heavy use of opengl (if at all), which accelerates the 3d view and powers the interface. The intel hd3000 (which I suspect is your video chip) is a very basic graphics chip (almost the lowest common denominator bar previous Intel chipsets), and will heat up considerably when you run even mediocre scenes in Blender. It’s not Blender’s fault: it is just a fact of 3d apps that they will all heat up your machine due to the video chip running overtime.
Your machine, being a low-entry laptop, was never intended to be used for 3d graphics in the first place, but for browsing, the occasional Photoshop edit, word processing, and so on. Running After Effects and Vegas on such a laptop is sort-of an option, but also begging for performance problems. Try editing full HD footage 24p/30p, and you will discover the truth in that last sentence.
2d applications like Photoshop, AFx, Vegas and Flash hardly make use of 3d acceleration - but adding a more complex 3d object in Photoshop, and (if properly hardware opengl accelerated, which is probably not even available on your machine) will turn up the heat in your machine as well.
So, in a nutshell: your video chip is the weakest link for 3d content creation, and any (not only Blender) 3d app will cause your machine to (over)heat. Most low-level consumer laptops were never meant to be used for heavy-duty opengl.
Solution for your laptop: none. Not Blender’s fault, not your fault, not your laptop’s fault. It was never intended for this type of usage pattern. Your laptop is non-upgradable in the video chip stakes.
Unfortunately, like others who have posted here before me , the only viable solution would be to upgrade to a laptop or desktop with a decent ati/nvidia GPU (video chip in layman’s terms). Avoid Intel video chips like the plague.
Anyway, OP, the best suggestion I could make would be to turn down your resolution on your OS so that Blender can run without having to do so much updating. I did this when I was using a crappy P4 with a Radeon 3000 mobility or something ridiculous like that. Other things could be turning off mipmaps (user prefs in Blender), turning off anisotropic filtering, and turning off lights in solid draw mode. These are little things though. One last thing, make sure in your computer BIOS that the shared RAM for your onboard graphics card is as high as it goes.
The answer is bake , bake and then bake some more cake .
But seriously that is the answer. And not even with 3d only. In music and audio production VST plugins can eat your CPU alive and of course over heating is the standard. If you don’t want to go down the “buy a better computer you moron” route , the next best route is baking, or as we call it in DAW “freeze track”, what it basically does is taking all your processing / sound / music of the track and store the end result to a mp3/wav which uses only memory and zero or close to zero CPU.
The same applies for 3d , baking in 3d is basically rendering is layers, you render a part at a time / layer at a time and you keep your computer consuming only a small fraction of your CPU. The disadvantages of layer by layer production is of course that can be quite slow to get back to editing the baked part , but I think the trade off is rather minimum.
Also braking things in layers is a very flexible and wise workflow.
So yes doing even extraordinary 3d with a single core and no gpu is perfectly possible, easy and reliable. Don’t get carried away by what other people may suggest to the contrary, loads and loads of extraordinary artists out there that have very old pcs and excellent art. Humans have been finding workarounds for limitations for thousands of years and those in some cases worked as good as complete solutions.
And nothing competes with Flash , it has defined the limits of crapiness like no other software out there .
Wow! We need a “Switch to 3DSMAX” too!
But I have a better ideas! Modifiers:
-3ds max modifier
-Maya modifier
-Commercial sofware quality modifier
-We need new feature modifier!!!
If you really must stick with your laptop there are some things you can do to increase blender’s performance, if that were your only problem. Heating up of the laptop happens especially with lower to low middle end HPs a lot. Fact is you are not going to like the solutions.
Your computer is tweeked to run normal programs. As for performance, Blender is a dream. I understand you don’t think so, but, if you were to use any other 3D apps for any amount of time, I believe you would change your mind.
These lower end machines are frequently overclocked and have crummy power supplies, leading to the heating problems you describe (and frequent fan problems, including fan burn-out). You could artificially lower the clock speed and that may help, but, you are probably not going to like the trade off. You could also change the render properties and allocate less resources to the render and that may help.
One of the things I did to increase the performance of Blender on my old system is switched to Linux. Blender runs very smooth on Linux. The other programs you describe do not compare in any real way to Blender, it is really apples and oranges.
There are certainly other things you can do to tweak performance and Blender is very helpful there. There are a lot of interface changes you could make to reduce the load a lot.
No matter what I would get a high quality cooling pad if you are heating up. The damage heat can cause is not worth the trouble.
Also, I would spit your renders out to file rather than the screen, you will probably notice not nearly as much heat up (I’m assuming your main problem is with renders). If it’s actually heating up during the use of Blender then tweaking the performance settings on the interface itself is what you’ll have to do. That, or get yourself another puter.
P.S. Just refreshed and saw the baking idea, that’s good too, of course.
