When I press Alt-A to preview the animation in 2.56, the framerate is about 20 fps that make me feel the animation is slower than normal, is there anyway to improve this ?
You can try pressing CTRL-Up Arrow while your mouse is over the 3D viewport. This will cause Blender to make the viewport fullscreen. Drawing just one screen can sometimes make Blender faster. Also, if you have a camera view and another 3D view drawing both views can slow Blender down. You can put the other 3D views into BOX display mode or simply turn them into a text window temporarily.
If you have a dense mesh background item, try changing it’s display mode to box only.
Some other small tweaks I’ve used: Deselect all objects in the 3D view and keys in the Dope Sheet/Action Editor and/or the F-curve Editor, and “windowshade” the latter two editors closed – you don’t need to remove them from the UI, just drag the frame edge as needed to eliminate the need for them to be redrawn; close the Tools and Properties panels if open; give simpler objects a “Wire” display mode; objects with higher poly counts can be given the bounding box mode as Atom recommends, but if you need to follow their forms and/or deformations more closely than that allows, create ultra-low-poly animation proxies of them. This can be done by assembling low-poly primitives into a close approximation of the animated object, or by decimating a dupe of the higher-rez mesh.
You could try checking the “Render Only” box (I believe it’s called) in the properties panel under the Display options. This will exclude things like bones and empties from your animation. Sometimes I find it excludes more than I want it to, however.
You could select ‘Frame Dropping’ in the playback settings for a more real-time playback.
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Thank you, my model is just about 3200 faces, not really a high poly. I tried your suggestion but even maximizing the 3dview and put the model in wireframe with Frame Dropping enabled didn’t get the framerate higher than 20 :no:
I think my system isn’t strong enough (coreduo 1.86ghz), in 2.49 I can get a decent 25-30 fps with the same model, 2.5 anyway runs slower in my machine :rolleyes:
A way to check if it’s a system limitation is to upload the .blend for others to try.
Thank you, you’re so kind :o, here’s my blend, I’m at the beginning of learning animation, you should expect a simple mesh with simple animation, just don’t laugh at it 
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xv8.blend (954 KB)
I never laugh at other folks’ work, unless of course it’s meant to be funny 
The biggest thing that slows your playback rate is the Edge Cut modifier. If you disable it your animation plays back at full 25fps easily. When enabled, the rate drops to about 15fps no matter what else I do to optimize the UI.
You can get a harder-edged view of the model when Edge Cut is disabled by switching the geometry smoothing mode to Flat. You might also consider reducing the use of Edge Split to only those model components that need it – if a component part is all hard edges, then use Flat mode for that part to get your hard edged look. You can apply Smooth or Flat to you geometry in Edit mode selectively, and thus reduce the number of Edge Split cuts you need.
As a general rule, any modifier that affects geometry either by subdivision, deformation or masking (masking in particular!) can really drag on the playback rate, so disable them when previewing animation at speed.
Ah, good tip, I’ll keep that in mind. I tested out the file and playback was 16~17 fps for me. My system is 2.8 ghz intel core 2 duo, 2 gigs ram, nvidia 8400 gs video. Not a real number-cruncher, but it works reasonably well for me.
Generally, when I want to view an animation at full speed, I make ‘playblasts’ of the scene. Set the 3d window to camera view and hit the clap-board icon. When finished, ctrl-f11 to playback. Only takes a minute or two and I’ve never had a scene too complex that the playback speed seemed to be less than the fps specified, (although I am sure it is possible with a really complex scene).
Randy
That was my standard procedure as well, for 2.4x, but I can’t get the OpenGL previewing to work at all in 2.5x, neither still nor animation. I think it’s a graphics card issue (mine’s an older ATI) – I get a message “Cannot create offscreen buffer.”
I had the same problem as well, chimasque, even started a thread about it here and submitted a bug report about it. My mobo had integrated intel video and I had the same problems. The bug report is still open. So I upgraded to a lower end nvidia card with 2 video outs so I can run 2 monitors. $70 from newegg. Also, I remember before upgrading, in the graph editor and action editor I had just the green cursor lines, now I have a green box attached to the cursor that shows the current frame number. There was another display problem, but don’t remember what it was, that was fixed by the cheap upgrade…
Randy
great tip, chipmasque, everything’s good now.