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?
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.
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.
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.