This is the first time I have dabbled with geometry nodes. It is following a tutorial. I am simply making a subdivided cube with little depressed insets. But it is really slowing my PC down. I have Windows 11 Pro with Intel i7-10700 CPU 16 cores. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Super with 64 GB Ram.
When I enter a numeric value in the node it takes a few seconds for the screen to update and refresh. Is this normal?
Are nodes CPU intensive or GPU?
Boolean is relatively expensive. You have quite a few of those, so my guess is that’s what is slowing it down.
Yeah mesh boolean can be computationally expensive, with self intersection turned on even more.
But you can have a look yourself, turn this on in the top right corner of your geometry nodes area.
Thanks, Debuk. What does that do? It didn’t seem to speed anything up other than putting a little clock icon above each node with a < sign and a decimal ms. ms stands for milliseconds?
At the bottom of putting in all the boolean coordinates, it was about a ten-second wait for refresh.
The little clock icon is telling you how much time each node takes, that will enable you to understand what is taking so long in the process.
To optimize this a bit, I would take all of the transform geometry nodes that move the UV spheres into position and combine all of them with a join geometry node, then use that joined geometry into a single boolean node, cutting all of the dots at once. I bet that will cut the processing time by >90%.
Build the puncher holes as a single geometry first, then boolean them, see if that will speed it up. You should have total 6 boolean operations that way. Or combine all the punchers into one geometry then do the boolean operation as a single mesh task.
Thank you kkar and SterlingRoth. I will have to learn way more about geometry nodes to be able to implement what you both are instructing. This is just a tutorial I am doing on building environments in Blender.
And I will learn geometry nodes. I was just amazed at how much it taxed my system. I just upgraded my GeForce and ram and it really made a difference in rendering speeds. So watching my computer crawl like it did doing this geometry node tutorial was a real eye-opener for me.
Geonodes are calculated on CPU, so the gpu cannot help you.
It’s a tool like anything else. It has strengths and weaknesses, and there’s more than 1 way to solve every problem.
If you build your nodes to play to the strengths, and avoid the weaknesses of the tool, you’ll have much better results.
In my tests, I was able to get a similar dice generator capable of doing the same boolean operation for all 21 dots and it only took 133ms to calculate:
Some of the tricks included:
WoW…thanks SterlingRoth.
I will study the file you built. I am humbled by your taking the time to do this. And thank you for the clarification of the geonodes being calculated in the CPU.
Thank you again. I am always surprised by the people on this forum and how they have always been so helpful. I have never encountered a forum like this, ever.
