I have two computers, an older one with a dual-core Intel processor, 8GB RAM and a GTX870 GPU (2GB) and a newer one with an eight-core AMD processor, 32GB RAM and a GTX960 GPU (4GB) RAM.
Sadly, both machines behave similiarly badly as far as previewing animations in the viewport is concerned (even using Solid view). I can hardly ever get above 10 fps. More often than not it’s actually below 5 fps…
And I am talking really simple animations here: The one I’m currently working on is just a bunch of text objects being moved, scaled and rotated in front of a fixed camera in sync to an audio track (at least that’s the plan - which is really hard to do without being able to do a proper realtime preview)… The text objects are neither extruded nor do they have any subsurf modifiers applied to them.
I used to think the poor performance was maybe due to the low processor power of the old computer which is why I bought the new machine in the first place. However, as far as Blender is concerned, the beefier hardware makes almost no perceivable difference at all.
Any ideas what I could be doing wrong? What kind of additional info would you need?
It shouldn’t be a problem really, as I have an older Intel Q6600, 4GB Old Ram, Nvidia 960GTX (4GB) and it’s just fine for me. Latest Nvidia drivers? Can you share the Blend file and maybe give more detailed System Specifications?
It seems my performance issues are not limited to Blender, so this was probably not the ideal place to discuss this. I’ve also got similar problems in other video applications like Premiere Elements or DaVinci Resolve: Preview playback is extremely choppy there, too. Then again, I’ve got no such issues simply playing back regular (/already rendered) video files…
As to your questions:
There are no scripts and there is nothing to bake. As I wrote, it’s just a bunch of text objects being moved, rotated and scaled. They have a simple solid color emission shader.
Specs:
Processor: AMD FX-8350 (supposedly 8x4GHz)
Mainboard: ASUSTeK M5A97 R2.0
Memory: Kingston 32GB DDR3 Dual Channel
HDD1 (OS, Programs and temp files): Samsung SSD 750 EVO (250GB)
HDD2 (more Programs and documents): Hitachi HUA723020ALA641 SATA (2TB)
HDD3 (Work Data, e.g. blend files, textures, fonts, etc.): External Toshiba USB3 (2TB)
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64bit (incl. Anniversary Update)
Blender: 2.77a (installed on SSD) and 2.78RC2 (portable version on internal SATA HDD)
I found that the performance increases (but still not to acceptable levels) when I close absolutely all other programs (i.e. browser, Gimp, iTunes, Dropbox, TeamViewer, etc.) but that shouldn’t really be necessary on a machine with these specs, should it?
The blend-file I’m currently working on depends on a few fonts that I’m probably not allowed to distribute so I’ll try to create a special version without dependencies and upload it later.
