[choo-chee]

I'm starting to think my system is not strong enough. Since introduction of the MXS elements, I use tons of trees and other blocks in my renders, and Maya starts to respond slowly. I mean, selecting and moving a- MXS block can take 10 seconds instead of a simple smooth mouse drag. I'm thinking, will adding more memory and an extra display card (now I have 12 GB and Quadro 1800 FX connected to 2 displays) will have an absolute impact on this slower performance? I really "like" my current system with all my apps and shortcuts and theme... and don't want to buy a complete new PC now. thanx ppl !

[Bubbaloo]

Not sure about Maya, but Max has LOD setting for MXS references that is very helpful. But yes, a better graphics card will help.

[choo-chee]

my LOD in maya is quite low, usually points cloud at 10 ;(

[numerobis]

More RAM will not be any different if you don't run out of memory - and i don't think this is the case, because it sounds like you're able to render the scene, so there must be some more free RAM left. But you can check the RAM usage in windows taskmanager.

But it would be interesting to know which processor you're using... This should be only related to single core performance and video card.

Maya version?

Some benchmarks for video cards performance in maya 2014

http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articl ... ation-166/

and pro cards only:
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articl ... 9/#Results

It's not really useful that they changed the test system and the maya version between these two reviews, but it seems to be clear that you still need a pro card for maya. Even a Titan can't compete with them.

There is no FX1800 in the test, but to compare it to your current system you could run SPECapc yourself:
http://www.spec.org/gwpg/apc.static/maya2012info.html

But it's very interesting to see that the Haswell system is more than 10% faster than Ivy Bridge-E in Maya with the same video cards

[polynurb]

two displays could be a bit much for the FX1800 if you run more complex scenes in maya which eat up additional vram.

you might want to try this little tool
http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

it can display info about your video card in real time, so you can see if you max out your vram while using maya.
it will also show the gpu utilization, which is interesting as it can tell if there is actually a cpu bottleneck feeding data to the gpu.

[choo-chee]

cpu is i7 at 3.07 Ghz.
The computer is quite fast and renders everything, I always check the task manager to make sure there is enough ram...
I guess it's time to try the tools you guys recommend
thanx
edit: the GPU-Z tool clearly shows that when I load a typical exterior scene with all those trees etc. , the GPU ram is maxed out. When I move one of those MXS refs., GPU load jumps to 90% and more...