Ok, so I just started using blender a week or so ago and I’ve sort of run into a problem that makes 2.5 a pain to use (I am using 2.5 because 2.49 is really slow for some reason and I like the UI feel of 2.5 anyway).
Whenever I try to place a background image on my scene, so I can model off of it, I get huge slowdown to the point where it’s terribly frustrating (only other object being a cube). When not using a background image, everything works just fine.
I read some other posts that had this problem, but they had ATI graphics cards. I did also try the work around by placing a plane, UV unwrapping, then placing a texture image over it using the UV mapping setting, but for some reason it wouldn’t display the image properly while the viewing window was in texture mode (texture was just plain white for some reason). When rendered you could see that the image was properly mapped however.
Anyways, I really just want the built in functionality to work because I want the image to appear in a few direction (Front and Right ortho) anyway.
DxDiag reports:
SYSTEM
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit (6.1, Build 7600) (7600.win7_gdr.100226-1909)
Processor: AMD Phenom™ 9500 Quad-Core Processor (4 CPUs), ~2.2GHz
Memory: 4096MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 3072MB RAM
Page File: 1299MB used, 4841MB available
Windows Dir: C:\Windows
DirectX Version: DirectX 11
BTW: Maybe this info might clear up why 2.49 is also incredibly slow for me as well. It doesn’t matter really though, because 2.5 is much more pleasing to me
If your whole 2.5 UI experience is sluggish then it could well be your vid card driver.
If it’s only when you load a background image it gets sluggish then why not load in a low resolution version of the image, if it’s only to model from. Trial and error would get you the combination of image quality against performance?
If it’s only when you load a background image it gets sluggish then why not load in a low resolution version of the image, if it’s only to model from. Trial and error would get you the combination of image quality against performance?
I have tried this already and yes it does improve the performance by about two times (256x256 png image at 66kb). However, for my system, it should have no problem using a single 800x600 jpeg image at 300kb. There has to be something going on here that should be fixed, not worked around. My software engineering side of me is telling me that something fishy is going on, I just don’t know what.
If your whole 2.5 UI experience is sluggish then it could well be your vid card driver.
No, it works lightning fast without a background image in 2.5.2.
Ok, I just noticed something a little weird. If I zoom out of ANY background image (tried all sorts of file formats and sizes), everything works snappy again. If I zoom in to ANY background image (even a very tiny one), I get weird slowdown. This however does not solve my problem because I do want to zoom in a little bit so I can get a more detailed shape on my mesh.
I also checked my CPU usage and my memory usage while doing the above tests. When working nothing changes with the memory or CPU power on any of my processors, while zoomed in or out. However, slowdown still occurs for some reason while zoomed in even the tiniest bit.
Update your video drivers. Don’t use Windows WDDM drivers.
That was it. Turns out XFX (maker of my graphics card) doesn’t dish out the latest and greatest. I have been using there website to get my drivers. That’s not going to happen anymore. Thanks again!
