I just downloaded the Blender 2.81 release and directly noticed a huge degradation in viewport performance when using the Material Preview viewport shading. I loaded the same scene in 2.80 for reference and it was fast again. The Solid viewport shading is blazingly fast even in 2.81 so it’s not general polygon performance. I use a lot of Nodes materials so maybe there are some changes with this in 2.81?
Are there any new settings in 2.81 that needs to be changed or is this a general degradation in performance? Anyone else noticing degradations?
I have isolated the material that is causing the performance issue now. The material is using four noise textures, among a lot of other things, and yes, you are right! If I remove those noise-nodes it gets fast again.
Is there any way of limiting the noise-calculations in the Material Preview mode?
Depends on complexity of the noise material involved. Any realtime native noise will be slower than a backed one. (i wonder why devs didn’t faked it, most software out there does this anyways when dealing with “procedural” textures, due to the inherehent speed penalty when (ab)using procedural noise generators).