Campbell stated in that commit message that his lazy-load optimization can also be made to work if there is a subsurf modifier in the stack, so if he gets that done that might be a nice little speedup there. That is only one point in the long list of optimization topics for mesh editing, so we do know the issue is not the architecture, it is everything being un-optimized. Recent actions suggest optimization is becoming a more important topic now with most of the incomplete items from 2.80’s release coming to fruition.
Animation playback performance improvements.
https://developer.blender.org/rBbf34b0c8f4b8c64bcc4ec0f3371d343e9c2fe029
https://developer.blender.org/rB752139556f58988d8717e12f6288fdce7eedd2ce
A major Eevee performance regression fixed.
https://developer.blender.org/rBb18c2a3c413b7741b2a854b7bd25721352be2589
Possible Eevee/Viewport performance boost
https://developer.blender.org/rBcecda64e2ead502a052f9bea5ffde39e4a46bf90
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I want to report that v2.90 has restored the FPS I used to get in 2.79 when editing under 2x subsurf. 2.8x was about 2fps for reference, 2.79 was about 15. That’s one of the showstoppers removed for me. Nice!
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In the latest blender 2.9 build Eevee animation playback it’s very smooth!! it’s on par with the solid mode viewport !!! Amazing!!! And animation playback in general it’s faster , now it’s all about open subdiv gpu acceleration ,come-on Sergey you can do this 
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It is great to hear positive things about the viewport now after half a year of lamenting how slow it is, I hope the devs. take this as encouragement and continue to bang things out to the point where 2.79 looks like a snail in comparison (In areas such as Editmode, deformation, and maybe even in Undo and in sculpting).
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There are still some problems to solve related to Subsurf, like the one I describe here at the end:
I think that when that report is closed as resolved, perhaps the GPU acceleration work can start to be implemented.
About OpenSubdiv GPU acceleration. We know that Eevee can be realy GPU usage intensive in some scenes. So I am also eager to know what the performance of OpenSubbdiv GPU acceleration with Eevee will be like in those cases.
Ive noticed words subsurf and subdiv on this forum are used interchangeably like they are one and the same. Isn’t subsurf short for subsurface scattering?
There is nothing related to things under the surface in “subdivision surface” so why call it subsurf? It really confuses me.
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Afaik, in blender, subsurf means subdivision surfaces. Don’t know where that came from. But yeah, I wish people stopped saying that, it’s kinda weird… 
Simply terminology from old users. Open Blender 2.7x, add the modifier and you read how it is named on the stack.
Still, I think it is the best abbreviation of words to refer to the modifier (one didn’t really need to write the word modifier to understand that one was talking about the modifier)
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subdivision surface
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And how do you call subsurface scattering then?
Subsurf is the abbreviation of subsurface scattering.
Subdiv or SubD should be the abbreviation of subdivision surface.
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SSS
But come on, let’s not make this thread off topic with this discussion.
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SDS here for years… 
Yup. Things moving in the right direction fast. Undo performance fixed, realtime subdiv performance fixed, and now Cycles render times 2x as fast (to me) as 2.8x. Super great.
I’ve been using 2.9 for a few days, still have too many crashes to be productive, but when it gets release stability, I bet it will be the update many of us leapfrog to from 2.7.
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from this week developers weekly:
Performance
- Undo: reduce undo memory usage and make undo faster when adding, removing and renaming objects. ( Bastien Montagne )
- Viewport: multithread mesh GPU batch computation. This helps improve animation playback with multiple animated meshes, for example increasing FPS 1.15x in a Spring production scene. ( Jeroen Bakker )
- Modifiers: more efficient multithreading of modifiers using BVH lookups like the shrinkwrap modifier. Increased animation playback FPS 1.1x in one Settlers production scene. ( Jeroen Bakker )
small steps, but in good direction
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Really 2.90 should be the LTS release. its going to be bad to give studios an LTS release with bad performance. Users in studios will ignore the installed version and use the 2.90 out of frustration specially since blender is portable small download…
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Are the recent subdiv performance improvements in master? Just tried the latest build and having 1.5 fps with subdiv on a relatively low poly mesh. Takes 10+ seconds to even add the subdiv modifier.
I kinda agree that the sculpt fixes and performance improvements currently in 2.90 builds make a very big difference, but 2.93 is an LTS too, and although it’s about a year out, by then the performance vs 2.83 will be night and day. At least 2.83 has some fixes to undo, and it’s a nice release overall.
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