[Tok_Tok]

I'm working on a car scene with around 750.000 poly's. This is a fairly heavy scene but I didn't expect it to be this slow as it is now. I've had scenes with millions of poly's and those were easier to work with. But that's years ago on a MUCH slower PC and at the time I was still using Brazil as renderer. So I deinstalled the maxwell plugin and opened the scene again, now it was much faster in responce and the amount of RAM was almost 4 times a low. Offcourse I don't have textures in the first image but still it's such a big difference:





Besides this problem I have many viewing problems, as you can see in the second image planes are only showing half of the objects through planes with Backface cull on. It's often very hard to select objects as you select through them. Objects sometimes don't view at all when moving the perspective.

Maybe this is all due to my graphics card, I have a quadro FX580.

So I have three questions, 1. Why is the difference in RAM and viewport speed so big? 2. Can I shut off the Max Maxwell plugin features to increase speed and only using it for rendering? and 3. Are these viewport problems a know issue or am I the only one having these?

[Mihnea Balta]

Try going to Customize -> Preferences, then in the Maxwell tab uncheck "use hardware shading". Does that make a difference?

[Tok_Tok]

Only the objects with standart or non-maxwell materials show now. It's solves the RAM problem but my entire viewport is now empty.

[Mihnea Balta]

Which version of Max is this? We've made some fixes to the viewport code which we should be able to release soon, but I want to re-test everything with your version, to see if we've missed something.

[Tok_Tok]

I'm using Max 2011. But the viewport issues have been going on for at least 2 years now. I learned to work with them and hoped it would be fixed with every new version of the Maxwell plugin
Unfortunately there's been no change and now with the memory problems also being a problem I thought best to report it.

I hope this can be fixed because the scene is now pretty much unworkable.

[Tok_Tok]

Bringing this topic up again because I'm bumping into the same problem again, it shows up whenever I get to scenes with a lot of polygons (near a million now). When I start adding maxwell materials it gets slow.

Is there any way to shut off the maxwell materials in the viewport and only see a basic color? Otherwise I'll have to buy a new grapics card I guess..

[zdeno]

looks like radeon issue ? or nVidia on board ?

[Bubbaloo]

He originally said he had a Quadro FX580. It's a previous generation card, but I'm running a Quadro 4000 at work and it lags with high poly counts. I ay do some tests with Maxwell vs. standard mats if I get some time.

[raduc]

I have a radeon 5700HD that can go up to 4 million polys before anything noticeable starts to happen to the fps, however there are some other things to consider here.

With 8 teapots of about 260 000 polys each + their own material viewable in the viewport, max has no trouble handling 2 million polys, however with 384 teapots with noticeably less polygons each and 8 materials distributed among them, but roughly the same amount of polys in total, max starts to lag, so it's more of a combination of how many objects you have in your scene, how many materials you preview at the same time as well as the current number of polygons.

You can reduce the lag if you turn off hardware acceleration in the maxwell settings dialog from customize->preferences and use the show in viewport checkbox from each map to preview the textures on objects, this brings max from ~7 fps to somewhere around 24 for me. You can reduce the lag even further if you only preview one material/texture at a time, but I don't know if that's an option.

[Tok_Tok]

With 8 teapots of about 260 000 polys each + their own material viewable in the viewport, max has no trouble handling 2 million polys, however with 384 teapots with noticeably less polygons each and 8 materials distributed among them, but roughly the same amount of polys in total, max starts to lag, so it's more of a combination of how many objects you have in your scene, how many materials you preview at the same time as well as the current number of polygons.

Yes this is centainly true, I get the same effect. In my case it is not the poly count that does the damage it's really the maxwell materials, when I add those everything starts to lag. Turning off Hardware acceleration I already tried as Mihnea suggested that earlier but that leaves me with wireframes only.

I'm starting to think there was something wrong with this card from the beginning, it's not just lagging, on many occasions objects start to disappear or Backface cull becomes a hole in Z space though where only a clean viewport is shown..

I could use to good recommendations of what kind of graphics card is perfect for Max and Maxwell.

[zdeno]

He originally said he had a Quadro FX580......

Yep, sorry. Did not catch that.

With radeon there was issue with bitmap size .

[Bubbaloo]

Personally, I would not spend the extra money for a Quadro. Get a current generation Nvidia gaming card. I have a GTX 580 at home and it does just as well if not better than this Quadro at work.

[Tok_Tok]

When I first got my Quadro I didn't notice any difference.. and still don't.. not with After Effects or 3ds max or any other program. There are plugins from Nvidia for photoshop and Max but I don't notice a difference. Now that I think of it, maybe I should try and disable the plugin. Gonna give that a try.

[Tok_Tok]

Oke that didn't help at all, if anything that made it worse.. I'm going to look for a gaming card that's not too expensive. I'm only a student you know