Blender Edit Mode Performance

Yeah it’s true but the comeback it’s impressive and performance it’s the only part where blender is behind Maya and 3ds max , in 2.90 we have performance improvements but we need more much more :grinning:

The developers seem to agree with you on that and have given performance a prominent spot (or even several) in the development roadmap.

3 Likes

That shows that you’re never developed software.
Performance is a very complex task. It is not some place in a code where you need just write something like “enable good performance”. Not just adding some faster libraries or just move to vulkan or something.
To have Performance devs need to do small tweaks all over the codebase of the whole blender. Each of that tweaks should be super careful - it shouldn’t break anything and code should be kept maintainable.
That’s why most of that tweaks has to be done by people with deep understanding of how blender works.

It is not like - “ok, now you have more money - just hire more developers who will improve performance”.

12 Likes

It’s more than that. Max has 100 full time devs, and separate Arnold and Bifrost teams(not sure if that’s included in the 100)

3 Likes

I didn’t develop software either and of course it’s very complicated stuff but as you wrote that a lot of small tweaks are need to optimize viewport performance I don’t understand why so much new fancy pbr stuff was added since 2016. Doesn’t it make the whole task much more complex to optimize? I could be completely wrong but I am afraid that there was a wrong focus from the ground up. To much eevee and to less raw mesh editing performance. Because how to explain that mesh editing is still much slower than 279.

2 Likes

Eevee and actual viewport rendering isn’t the bottleneck in most cases.

5 Likes

The thread should be renamed because the performance problems we are all concerned with have in fact nothing to do with rendering/drawing. They have to do with the data structures used to store mesh elements and how cleverly they’re iterated over/converted while doing operations on them (as far as I understand, that is).

6 Likes

The issues directly reflect perceived viewport performance by the user, a title change is unnecessary. Users don’t care about underlying data structures.

2 Likes

This is what I mean with „wrong focus“.
The new 2.8 Blender dependency graph changes gives us a few performance boost in other areas but edit mode is now slower than before.
Maybe I misunderstood the roadmap 4 years ago but * [Performance and responsiveness] in regards to edit mode is still not on par with 2.79 and we are heading to 2.90 now.

Is there some accessible information on how many developers there are for Maya? I didn’t find anything in the annual reports.

Only information I heard was in an interview with Ton where he mentioned there being 10-20 devs for Maya.

I’m not sure about Maya, but I’m on the Max beta these last few years and they’ve had a significant increase in team members. I just presumed Maya team would be similar to Max. Also, the Maya Arnold and Bifrost teams are part of the total dev count.

Probably not, archviz and whatnot would add a lot to the Max userbase, Maya is a tad more specialized, industry-wise.

Fair enough. Would be interesting to see some numbers though, shame annual reports are not that detailed. Further complicating things is that Blender does some additional things that Maya/Max doesn’t (Grease pencil, VSE, Comp) taking up more dev time.

Calling it “viewport performance” is both inaccurate (because it does not affect the entire viewport, but mostly edit mode) and further misleading - @dave62 above was led to think it had to do with the rendering code when it is in fact completely unrelated to that. I’d call it “edit mode performance” because that’s really what the discussion is about. Well, that and opensubdiv as well, which also affects pose mode.

I am not saying we users should know all about Blender’s data structures, but it’s always better to be somewhat informed. I don’t insist though, I’m fine with whatever this thread is called. I’m just saying this could avoid some confusion.

6 Likes

I agree. It’s not viewport performance if the most common example of bad performance is slow transform operations in edit mode while rotating the viewport camera in same case is completely fine.

1 Like

We have two major performance issues :frowning:
The one is the edit mode and the other is the animation playback

4 Likes

I’m unfortunately very aware of both. Just trying to simplify the point.

The GPU isn’t the limiting factor here, whats your CPU and what is it clocked at?

Ryzen 9 3900X 3.79 Ghz + Geforce Rtx 2070

1 Like

Add weight painting, hair editing (I know - I know, end of life, new system coming any minute now) and any node manipulation (in heavy scenes) to the list.

4 Likes

I would also add the modifier stack to the performance woes. Any sort of decent stack and the viewport starts to lag.

5 Likes