Sorry if this is old news but I just discovered some sort of major preformance drain in v2.25 and v2.28 (the download release). I wanted to see just how much improvement I was getting on my new computer (Dual 2.8GHz Xeon :P) so I downloaded Blender and opened up an old project. Realtime windows were great, I could show most scenes quickly where they crawled on my old computer. But then I went and hit Alt-A…and got met with a sllowwwww frame rate. I opened it up in v2.22 (I always go back to that version :-?) and ZIP it’s playing back normally.
Any idea as to what’s up? I do like the drop-frame playback in 2.28 for audio sync but I’ll stick with 2.22 untile the OpenGL frame-rate preformance is the same. I’m talking BIG difference here.
Hmnmm, I just rendered an animation and played it in both 2.26 and 2.28 in ALT+A mode and they were both the same. I have not noticed a problem at all. But most of my anims are not very complex mesh wise, so it could be something to do with that end.
try to turn of the international fonts…or TrueTypeFonts that is, it might slow down whole OpenGL draw interface for Blender, and therefore animation playback in 3D window turns to slow…
I’m sure I’ve had this. (I’m on Windows btw, not sure what you are).
Around 2.23 seems to be the fastest version. As said, fonts slow it down a lot, but I also find the NLA, character animation and combine them with subsurfs and they will all crawl, but newer versions seem to hit their limit a bit quicker.
Also, I don’t believe Blender will in any way use multi-processors, but of course, you should be able to run it twice with no performance hit, which would be nice for background rendering. (Poorly concealed envy . . . )
EDIT: There was one other time I got something like this, when I was on Linux and didn’t have my graphics card set up right, the computer was fast enough to do basic stuff in software, but it starts to fall over sooner. Is it possible that the newer versions aren’t getting to your graphics card properly, whereas the old ones did? Just a possibility.
I am in Windows XP. Turning off the “international fonts” didn’t have any effect.
I don’t think the fonts or poor graphics card setup is the problem, it is directly related to viewing a 3D window with Alt-A, or changing frames in general. Rotating the view or general modeling works quickly. I measured the preformance using Fraps (a little utility that displays the frame rate of a 3D window) and with a vertex heavy scene (177229 verts) with shading on I get less than 1 FPS when using Alt-A in 2.28 and about 9 FPS in 2.22, in wireframe I still get less tha 1 FPS in 2.28 and about 12 FPS in 2.22. In all instances one of the processors is up at 100%, so it is dependant on the CPU, not the GPU.
Actually Blender does end up using all of one CPU and a about 2% of the 2nd one when rendering. If I’m rendering yes I usually run 2 copies at once now
Tried that one too, I also tried disabeling sound, neither had much effect on preformance. Turning of the sync just made it go one frame at a time instead of dropping frames.
2.22 is also alot faster on my comp…I mean faster then any other release…for the interface AND the renderer…a pic was rendering in 1min30 in 2.22…and in 2.28(about the same result in 2.27 and 2.26) it was rendering in 2min20
