Max 2008/9 and XP64/Vista 64

[bob-cat]

Hi all,

I am wanting to upgrade from my max 9 on xp32, to either 2008 or 9 on xp64 or vista64.

I am thinking max 2008 on xp64? But because of the huge pain to upgrade maybe I should go Vista 64 and max 2009 to save another future upgrade?

BIG question, but would love to here from anyone who has done this or are thinking of this and their opinions etc.

Cheers

[Fekta.studio]

Allready done it, some issue with viewport speed in max 2009 but that is fixed with sp2 or when delete some files in stplugin dir.
The matther with Vista, no problem so far.. all work fine..

Im satisfy from this upgrade...

recommend.

[flino2004]

if you go vista, desable all the fancy feature to get the maximum performance...all those effects take a lot memory and speed...I did it and now vista works as well as XP.

Fernando

[DrJan]

I'd go for Vista as well, even though I'm using XPx64 at work, just to be settled for the future.
I'm having no problems with XPx64 though (except that I can't connect my Sony Ericsson phone anymore, since they haven't released any x64 drivers).

[gilpo]

I recently went Vista 64 for testing purposes. Mostly positive except for one main area: video card performance. Massive drop in viewport speed from xp to vista on the same scenes and same hardware. This is especially bad on the 6000 series of GeForce cards. It seems that the Vista64 drivers are somehow limited to make these cards perform terrible. There are some forums where people have hacked xp64 drivers to make them work on Vista64 and give you back your performance, but they compromised my overall system stability so I went back.

I eventually upgraded to an 8800GTS which helped a bit, but it's still way slower than xp ever was on a bad day.

[RayOfLight]

There seems to be another reason to choose for Vista. Although more memory is used at first in Vista, after starting max or a renderengine, Vista frees this memory to use it all for the program most needing it.

[Donald2B]

I recently went Vista 64 for testing purposes. Mostly positive except for one main area: video card performance. Massive drop in viewport speed from xp to vista on the same scenes and same hardware. This is especially bad on the 6000 series of GeForce cards. It seems that the Vista64 drivers are somehow limited to make these cards perform terrible. There are some forums where people have hacked xp64 drivers to make them work on Vista64 and give you back your performance, but they compromised my overall system stability so I went back.

I eventually upgraded to an 8800GTS which helped a bit, but it's still way slower than xp ever was on a bad day.

Bringing this thread back from the dead. I am having the same issues with viewport performance and Max2009. My main problem areas are that when trying to select something with the bounding box, it flickers or there is almost a 1 second delay in the selection. To solve this problem, I have to turn ON all of the fancy "Aero" features and then I no longer get the lagging selection box.

I am also encountering incredible slow downs when viewing ANY VRay proxy mesh. In XPx64 in my test file, I can average around 40-50fps, yet in Vistax64 I can barely manage 2-3fps. This is an absolute deal breaker for me. The real kick in the pants is that most of the other applications work better than in XPx64 and I seem to be having better stability within Vista.

I am currently running an nVidia GTX280 1GB Memory, 8GB RAM, Dual Xeon x5355 procs. Anyone else run into these problems also? I am currently setting up another partition to really test with Windows7x64 and hopefully some of these issues have been addressed. I really want to get out of XP just because the OS world is moving forward and XPx64 bit support for hardware drivers just isn't as good as it used to be.

Thanks for any insight! ~Troy

[gilpo]

I remember vlado mentioned something about the proxy file format changing a little (I think maybe for SP2). If you remake your proxies using the latest vray, they are much faster. Using old proxies is dog slow. Still not as good as using good ol' XP overall. At least, that's what I've found. Regardless, after putting in a few hundered, I have to go to bounding box mode to get any decent fps.

Also try totally disabling aero then rebooting. See if that helps at all. I know that Max auto-disables it at launch, but I have a feeling it's still messing with stuff in the background.

[Donald2B]

Thanks for the information about the proxies, I forgot about that. As for Aero, I need to have it turned on. When I turn Aero off, I get a really annoying lag when selecting anything with the bounding box. The strange thing is that I put in an older Quadro FX4500 video card, downloaded the lastest drivers from nVidia and it ran almost 5x faster than the GTX280 does. Yet when I am in XPx64, the GTX280 is at least 5x faster than the older Quadro FX4500.

[rmejia]

I am using Vista x64 and the viewport performance decreased from when I was using XP x64. It gets really bad depending on the scene size, but at lower poly count scenes it is alright. Have you tried switching between Direct3D and OpenGL to see if there is any difference. I tend to turn on and off layers, work with just one viewport (switching the views in that one rather than working with 4 viewports at a time) and isolate things to get a better viewport performance. But yeah ... the viewport performance sucks, it is one of my biggest problems with Max and Vista.

[Donald2B]

Yeah, I have been testing settings for the past couple of days. Everything from different Aero settings to different nVidia driver settings. I guess that I was just used to the VERY fast performance that I was getting in XPx64.

I am starting to get concerned about this Vista/Win 7 and Max2k9 performance issue. I don't know where to put the blame. What I do know is that XPx64 is getting a little less support every week. Drivers are getting very hard to come buy for some newer hardware. Hopefully SP2 for Vista or a new update or Max will get the viewport performance back to where most of us were accustomed to.

[voltron7]

I have one vista ultimate 64 cpu and one with xp64 both using max9 x64. I would go with Vista Ultimate since I was told by a few cpu buildiers that x64 is going to be phased out, in favor of vista. Please correct me if that's incorrect. Once I did away with some of the fancy frosting on Vista, it outperforms the xp64 one slightly (although the computer is a little better, too...)

[Donald2B]

Well, I figure that since there are not going to be anymore service packs for XPx64 that the writing is on the wall. So that is what started my testing in Vista x64 and Win7 x64. Max9 x64 works great for me on any OS at the moment, regardless of my Aero settings. Not until I start using Max2009 x64 do things start to go belly up. I have been able to do more testing with a Quadro FX4500 video card and I can tell you that there is a significant performance increase. I attribute that to the quadro drivers from nVidia as well and the nVidia performance driver for Max2009. That combination really seems to make Max2009 fly. There are still some pretty big performance hits when you start working with proxies, but the impact is not nearly as severe as it is with a GTX280. So this all may be driver related with nVidia. I will keep digging, but for now I will be triple booting my computer between the following OSes: XP x64, Vista Ultimate x64, and Windows 7 x64. I am sure that I will see more pros and cons the more I use the different OSes and hopefully will be able to make a smart, educated decision as to what the future holds for us. T

[HAWF]

I'm still using Max2008 + XP x64 and works great. I've used Vista x64 for a couple of months and I really didn't like it.

[flipside]

Allready done it, some issue with viewport speed in max 2009 but that is fixed with sp2 or when delete some files in stplugin dir.
The matther with Vista, no problem so far.. all work fine..

Im satisfy from this upgrade...

recommend.

Hi, where do you find SP2? I can only find SP1 for max 2009.

Thanks,

wouter