Vista Aero makes blender FASTER???

Does anybody know anything about this?

I just reformatted. Once I got all my drivers and stuff installed, I loaded up blender and noticed that it was performing significantly worse than before. I realized that I’d been using Aero previous to reformatting and that this time around I’d turned if off. I have the system to run it (Intel QX9600 quad-core 3ghz proc, 4gb of ram, geforce 8800gt) but I figured that I would get better performance without it.

So, out on a limb, I turned on Aero and retested blender… only to find that it did bring my performance back to what I was expecting.

All I have to ask is… WTF? I have to run Aero to get Blender to run decently on my system?

-Sam

I’d say that it might be setting the video card clocks back in a pure 2D environment and when Aero is enabled, it’s kicking in the 3D clock settings of the video card. Just a wild guess though.

I think I have had the same problem before, when I set the Windows colour scheme to “Windows Vista Basic” in Appearance Settings. Aero was disabled and Blender would perform very sluggishly, but when I enabled Aero it was fine.

After a bit of searching, I found a blog post mentioning a problem with the Windows taskbar. It turned out that Blender would run properly if its window was re-sized so that the bottom edge didn’t touch the taskbar (more specifically, so long as it didn’t touch the start menu orb).

I also noticed that Blender will run properly on my computer, with its window maximised (touching the taskbar) and Aero disabled, if I use the “Windows Standard” scheme. You could try that if you want to disable Aero, as it should let Blender run maximised without slowing it down.

Same thing here (9800GX2, dual quad Xeon, 16GB ram). I find if I re-size Blender’s window, it starts working again (in non-Aero mode).

t’s not like your system can’t handle it, it’s vista or the display drivers interacting with vista. No problem on xp or xp-64, same rig.


Kevin

I forgot about that little quirk as well. I have to maximize and minimize Blender a few times to get the draw speed to get to where it should be. That’s with an 8800GT and Athlon X2 5000 BE.

Holy crap… blender does appear to run smoother in aero… thanks for the tip!

Didn’t believe that Aero was faster but when you said that, I tried. OMG it is so much smoother.

Edit: Counter strike Source is about 10 fps faster also and photoshop startup time went down from 6 seconds to 3.

Make ctrl+alt+t benchmarks or something, without knowing anything about aero, I’d say it makes blender run like it normally should.

I switched my systems over last night… really… everything seems faster! That’s ridiculous haha

Cool though… that really was an incredible tip!

I turned off Aero the moment I got my new PC months ago. Months later I got bored with the basic scheme and turned on Aero and I found that it really didn’t slow down the system. Bottom line for me is that contrary to what most people think, Aero doesn’t hog resources. I have dual boot with XP and have checked the speed of both using Blender and Vista runs a bit faster. Also, Aero keeps my PC looking new. Lol. No way I’m going back to XP. Naa.