Is it possible for Blender to tell my system to use more resources?
What I mean by that is for Blender to use more processing power specifically.
For example, I am working on an extremely dense dynamic sculpt currently which has a ridiculous tri count and my computer seems to be doing fairly well with it, however every once in a while there are slow downs and hang-ups that frustrate me (even though they are just inconveniences, they don’t crash Blender or anything).
Under the hood, my machine has a 3930K i7, 64 GB RAM, and 2x GTX 670s. I have watched its CPU usage and RAM (less relevant) and notice that the the CPU usage seems to never go past like… 10% (well, the most I have seen is 12%).
My understanding is that Blender only asks for what it needs and as long as my OS can allocate those resources to it, it delivers. However, it seems like Blender could use a little more CPU juice.
Is there anyway for Blender to make more efficient use of my processing power? Once again, I am not talking about rendering, just working in the viewport sculpting and such.
There are others here more qualified to answer this. However, one idea:
If you use Windows, you could try increasing Blender thread priority via Task Manager.
The most common percentage you will probably see is 8% or there abouts i am guessing? this is because there are a lot of operations in blender which are single threaded… which means that only one core will be able to process them, seeing as the 3930k has 12 threads… 100/12 = ~8% … There are a lot of operations which have been multithreaded, such as matchmoving / rendering / compositing etc.etc., however there are alot which havent been & some which cannot be multithreaded. sculpting i believe is multithreaded, but usually isnt relying on the cpu as much as gpu.
With blender viewport, the dual 670s wont help at all, infact it will be worse if you have sli enabled (i believe they call it multigpu mode now). make sure this is disabled for optimal blender usage (this INCLUDES rendering, you can still render on both cards with sli disabled)
next time you experience the slowdowns, write down exactly what you were doing (how many polys, how long you have had blender open, how long you have been in sculpt, ram usage, how long you have had dynamic topology enabled, how many objects in the scene, etc.etc.), then again the time after that you experience it… and again the third time, and see if there is a corrolation… there may be a loose thread or something… after finding out exactly what it is, submit a bug report… and the coder will spend a little bit of time investigating whether or not there is an actual bug going on.
Yea, I didn’t SLI my cards, Just got them for Cycles rendering. In terms of the viewport stuff, however, it doesn’t seem to be the displaying of the object when rotating and moving around the scene that is the issue (what I assume the GPU is handling), more with the physical manipulation of the mesh when sculpting. Does the GPU handle mesh modifications/calculations as well or is that the CPU? I just assumed that the CPU took care of that.
I experience the same thing on my machine, particularly while moving large meshes with modifiers not applied (but I really like to avoid applying modifiers). By the way, my rig is like a little brother to yours. 3820K i7, 16GB, 2x GTX 660ti. I’ve tried the usual recommendations: turn off double sided faces, turn off SLI, experiment with VBOs, etc. Others claim to have big viewport improvement, but I don’t seem to notice any difference. Manipulating the view is fast and fluid, but grabbing a large object, whether it be curve or mesh, (even with “Outline Selected” turned off) slows the viewport to a crawl.
Yea, I have tried all of those options as well and can’t say I really see any improvement. Oh well, I really like my machine (yours sounds pretty awesome too) it’s not the end of the world. Like I said as well, this sculpt that I am having the issue with is massive and not efficient by any means, the fact that my computer seems to be chugging along and handling it is impressive either way.
I’m considering buying an older ($150 or less) AMD GPU to add to the mix. Does anyone know if the AMD (viewport) / nvidia (cycles render) combination would help?
Probably would, ever since the 300 series and drivers newer then 195… nvidia have implemented a OGL limitation, which effects viewport interactivity & selection. not sure if it specifically will help with sculpting… but yes overall should help