Hi Guys! I have a question about Blender’s viewport performance.
I have a well performing up-to-date hardware (16 GB Ram, GeForce 460GTX 1 GB Ram) but I noticed that Blender struggles with high-poly scenes/objects.
I have imported a 1.5 mil. poly mesh which in Max I am able to navigate around with 100-150 FPS. I don’t know how to activate FPS counter in Blender but while navigating it seems like it runs well below the comfortable for work >30 FPS. It feels like 10-15 FPS.
Is it me or that’s just Blender’s limitation with more complex stuff? I’m using Blender 2.63.13
I installed the addon, turned off outline selected, VBOs enabled, multires not at the bottom, GLSL shading on.
I see no perceivable increase in performance.
Did you actually run the operator? It’s really all in the instructions.
To see the difference, just add a dense mesh and press ALT+A to display FPS. Then, manually toggle the double-sided option for that mesh.
Did you actually run the operator? It’s really all in the instructions.
I ran it through spacebar menu it doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference. (By seem this time I mean looking at the FPS too)
With a 1.5m mesh (including 4 multires levels) I get about 4-6 fps in GLSL with no outline and with or without the addon executed.
The addon doesn’t even seem to make any difference in pure solid mode.
There is however a significant increase in FPS with simple deform at the bottom of the stack ( to about 16), this though doesn’t work
in the sculpt mode so It’s not a solution to me.
Ok, now with just executing the addon I get to about 37 FPS in sculpt mode with solid shading at 6 milion (?) polys and
50 fps at 1.57 milion.
Getting back to object mode or turning on GLSL results in about 1 fps. (8 FPS wth simple deform)
So it looks like it’s not just me. It turns out that blender can’t take advantage of the more recent hardware? I hope there’s just something we don’t know or some settings that we didn’t make.
No it is a combination of hardware manufacturers purposefully disabling, or at least crippling certain aspects of their devices either via hardware, or software in an attempt (perhaps) to sell more ‘professional’ grade cards for a much higher mark-up, and Blender supporting ancient hardware / OpenGL versions.
I definitely think Blender developers need to look at the OpenGL interaction though, supporting 5 / 10 year old hardware has it’s downsides - I do believe one of the Gsoc students is looking into this area, but I am not sure if it’s going to involve speed improvements.
As far as I know Modo uses OpenGL for shading as well but it doesn’t experience these viewport issues. I’ve seen some heavy scenes with millions of polys handled easily (well above 20-30 FPS) by it on a moderate PC. Nothing like Blender’s OpenGL viewport.
It’s not the nVidia has crippled its cards, its that it took out hardware used for LOOOOOONG outdated OpenGL calls that have no place in modern software anyway. A few CAD programs (Blender included) still use these calls. My opinion is that Blender needs to stop trying to support ancient hardware at the expense of more readily equipped users because it holds back Blender being taken seriously as a whole, but that’s an argument for a different day. The point is that there are ways around the slowdown for the time being. GLSL mode is a different beast.
No it is a combination of hardware manufacturers purposefully disabling, or at least crippling certain aspects of their devices either via hardware, or software in an attempt (perhaps) to sell more ‘professional’ grade cards for a much higher mark-up, and Blender supporting ancient hardware / OpenGL versions.
No, OpenGL per se works fine in 3ds max and don’t they support older hardware. As Zalamander said NVIDIA turned off acceleration for double sided shading which by itself isn’t that big of a deal.
It’s a combination of Blender devs not giving a fuck about viewport performance and Blender devs not giving a damn about viewport performance.
Or at least so It’s been, here’s hoping ‘viewport FX’ is to change that.
I don’t think it’s as simple as “because it supports old hardware”, as after all those “old hardware” are not supporting GLSL at all, so if you experience slowdown when in GLSL mode it’s certainly something else going on in Blender as why would there be any “old hardware” code running in GLSL if “old hardware” can’t use this mode.
I’m sure there are some optimisation that will be done sooner or later, hopefully this years’ Viewport GSOC project will help a very lot on this subject.
By example, i remember there were discussion about “matcaps” for sculpting similarly to all the sculpting applications does.
In Blender the way to obtain “matcaps” is only through GLSL as you setup such thing through the material. And then it’s very slow from the reports.
In Sculptris , while like Blender it uses OpenGL “matcaps” do not use GLSL in sculpt mode (it uses GLSL for the “matcaps” in Paint Mode though), and it’s fast to use “matcap” in Sculptris.
I’m using Blender 2.63.13