3dsmax blinking in Windows 7

[TheLooopCGI]

Guys, do you also experience the annoying blinking of 3dsmax when having a really heavy scene in the viewport?

Since Windows Vista and 7 the 3dsmax window is always going completely white and then dissappearing and reappearing on the task bar - like blinking in and out. It's always when we have a heavy scene (20+ mil polys) in the viewport in box mode and then switch to wireframe or shaded...

I guess it's becase since Vista the windows gui is drawn by the graphics card and not CPU... but man it sucks...

[mike_kennedy]

There is a feature in Vista and Windows 7 called "Aero" it can be turned off per application. Older versions of Max did this automatically and I don't have the issue so I can recalled exactly where it is....

I found this link for Vista..perhaps in Win 7 it's the same method...

http://www.vistaclues.com/turn-off-t...ero-interface/

[TheLooopCGI]

Yea, I know... Unfortunately it doesn't work, it's still flashing in and out

[mike_kennedy]

What video card are you using..I have never seen this issue unless I have another 3d app open on the same monitor

[TheLooopCGI]

All kinds of GeForces and Quadros. I haven't tried ATI card, true. But on Nvidia cards it's happening on all the computers we have (or had) in our company, being it a simple desktop or a 2CPU render server. It's something that was happening to us since 3 years when Vista came out.

It's also happening on a clear system with just 3dsmax installed. It also doesn't matter which version of 3dsmax...

I probably have to get an ATI card somewhere and test.

Could you please also test it on your computer?
Just create a sphere with 64 segments in an empty scene file, then switch all viewports to wireframe mode, then copy that sphere 10000x times and then try to select them all. Max will just calculate, calculate, calculate, memory will go a bit up, CPU usage will be forever there and you will notice that on the taskbar the 3dsmax app is disappearing and appearing twice and then disappearing again...

Thanks a lot for help.

[mike_kennedy]

Will do, what version of Max are you using..I have access to 2010 and 2011...will test with both and see what happens.

[mike_kennedy]

2011, ATI 5850 1 gig..pretty current drivers, no issue in wire frame or shaded mode..took some time but it was fine.

Do you keep all your poly's in the main scene?
If you do one thing I would try to make life easier if your scenes are
so huge is to look at Xref or containers if your not already using them...
My Config

Windows 7 64
Max 2011 64
ATI 5850 1 GIG
Intel COre i7 920
12 Gigs of RAM

[TheLooopCGI]

Thanks a lot for the test Mike!

So maybe I have to try some ATI card.

Yes sometimes we use xrefs and sometimes we have it all in a scene. Unfortunately there is no difference

Could somebody in the forums please do the same test with an nVidia card? Thanks!

[Donald2B]

I just tried this on a couple of my machines here, both worked just fine. There is a TON of memory usage doing this, so if you don't have enough RAM, you are definitely going to run into some problems. Each machine was using well over 6GB to do this. Machine specs below:

Machine A:
Windows 7 x64
Max2011 x64
nVidia GTX 480 w/ 1536MB Memory - Driver: 259.47
Dual Xeon 5355 Quad Core
8GB Ram

Machine B:
Windows XP x64
Max2011 x64
nVidia Quadro 4500 w/ 512MB RAM Driver: Latest from nVidia
Dual Xeon 5355 Quad Core
12GB RAM

[TheLooopCGI]

Thanks for the test Donald2B!

Yea RAM is not an issue. We have 16GB of ram in our desktop computers and about 60GB in our servers. I don't know exactly how much the test takes but it should be like you say.

You have very quick graphics cards so maybe you would need to make more spheres for the test probably. Could you please do the test with not 10 000 spheres but 20 000 on your 12GB machine? If it's not a big issue... We have quite slow graphics cards here. Only 9500GT in desktops and one Quadro 580 in a server.

EDIT: Ah but I see that you have Windows XP on your 12GB computer This problems with 3dsmax blinking in and out happens only on Vista and 7.

[Donald2B]

Yep, I just reread your original post and did the test again on that machine. I have that one dual booting between XP and 7. Still very slow, but it still works just fine.

Just an FYI, mike_kennedy is also using a pretty high-end ATi card. It may be that these cards are fast enough not to show the problem. I have never had a quadro lower than a 3400, so I don't know what type of performance to expect out of a Quadro 580 (an entry-level Quadro).

I also noticed that I have highly customized the interface and turned off some of the fancy stuff. It still looks like Win7 only without all the transparency stuff.

[TheLooopCGI]

Hmm, yea Quadro 580 is a cheap one. We wanted to test the professional capabilities of the card before we spend thousands of EUR for a "real" card. Benchmarks on the internet showed very promising and Quadro 580 was supposed to be very fast but in our tests it was not faster than the cheap gaming card GeForce 9500GT.

In my computer I have a bit older but still quite fast gaming card GeForce 8800GT and it's also blinking in and out. Strange...

As for Win7, we usually keep the Classic theme - all effects off.

[crazy homeless guy]

My machine blinks frequently. Annoying as all get out. Whatever that means.

I think it is partially caused by Windows7 wanting to group the tabs at the bottom of the screen when there gets to be to many. Max glitches, creates and extra tab, Windows7 tries to consolidate them into a group, then Max closes the glitched tab, Windows tries to unconsolidate, etc... I think that is what is causing the blinking for me.

Max2011/Windows7/Aero turned off/12gb of ram/quadrofx1800.

[Donald2B]

Here are my settings for Win7. I have a couple of computers around the office that aren't crazy powerful and I have yet to see this blinking. I do know that Max2011 relies much more heavily on the GPU than previous versions. I guess this is what we get for asking for more stuff to be placed on the GPU.

[JeffG2]

Anyone find a solution to this?

I'm on XP64 and after Vray finishes rendering I have to sit through minutes of interface "blinking".