Constant Unresponsive

[glorybound]

SP1, SP2, SP3 fixed the issue - living large!

[chris-x//]

You can't tolerate any lag with such a monster machine

[benb32]

Know most of the performance and lag issues seem to be resolved by the service packs and graphics card drivers. As a legacy point, the performance of the display can be limited by the interface used. HDMI on anything but the most recent graphics cards (900 series for nVidia which support HDMI 2.0 assuming the cable does also) operates on version 1.4 - which limits the refresh rate to 24Hz on any resolution above 1080p. This can also be made worse by using a HDMI cable that is of poor quality or below the 1.4 standard. The symptoms exhibited by this setup is screen tearing when dragging windows and the mouse pointer not redrawing properly. It is also significantly worse when using any program at full screen, which is more due to the display driver. I've found the display performance of all the nvidia 900 consumer cards to be similar, memory size not making a significant difference except when using GPS rendering. Display port is always preferable in a multi monitor setup, as the the interface doesn't use a clock, so more outputs can be supported while keeping the graphics hardware simpler. Also display port version 1.2 (which has been supported on the previous generation of graphics cards) supports 60Hz at 4K. Thus even when the user interface is being worked hard it gives the appearance of things being more fluid.

In terms of lag and waiting for things to happen in programs, I have found hard disk speed to be more of a factor. Assuming the system isn't memory starved in anyway, optimising hard disk storage is probably the most helpful direction. The latest Samsung SATA disks are quite good, plus the Samsung magician software has a wizard to do all the optimisation features for you. SATA will always be limited by the number of IOPS (Input Output Operations per Second) as the standard wasn't designed for anything other than mechanical spinning drives. A modern SATA SSD can quite easily have a sequential through put of 500MB/s read and write, however it's random IOPS can be significantly slower. The typical usage and access pattern for opening and using Max for example is driven more by the random access performance. The best way to improve performance is to use a PCIE nvme SSD, which have random IOPS performance in the order of 5 x that of SATA SSD. The samsung 950 pro and intel 750 drives are good examples, with the intel drives having better write endurance but being more expensive.

Finally, the nature of some programs (including Max) is to be reliant on single threaded performance. This makes a trade-off between the power of a machine and it's performance. Having a fast CPU clocked at over 4GHz seems to allow for faster more responsive display performance, but will be beaten hands down by a larger more parallel CPU when it comes to rendering.

All in all, the actual performance is based on a variety of factors including CPU single threaded speed, number of cores, number of memory channels (but not so much by memory speed) and random IOPS speed of the underlying hard disk system.

Benjamin

[glorybound]

With the new machine, I have only been installing things as I need them. This is allowing me to see potential issues. Both Autograss and Walls&Tiles, although I like both, cause havoc. Autograss basically slowed a render to a crawl and Walls&Tile makes the whole UI wonky. Once I installed Walls&Tiles things started to disappear when editing them and the material browser is brought to a crawl.

[glorybound]

Can a plugin over right things and permanently cause damage. I am telling you, things were screaming until I installed Walls&Tile, and even thought I uninstalled it, things are still wonky. I rebooted MAX, but not the machine, so we'll see.

[glorybound]

Uninstalling and rebooting my machine solved the issue.

[Vizioen]

Uninstalling and rebooting my machine solved the issue.

And did you also reinstall W&T?

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Hi Bobby, years back Autograss really messed up my machine so i woudl not be surprised if its doing again nowadays.
The plugin is obsolete in many ways anyway so cheer up and use FP

[glorybound]

I removed both Autograss and Walls&Tiles and I'll keep an eye on things.

[glorybound]

Where do I sign up for the beta? Also, thanks for the help on the new machine.PSD Manager is working great and is one of the first things I installed; a must have.

As the developer of psd-manager I feel a little bit offended by this statement (maybe just lost in translation, the term fingerpointing in german has a negativ vibe).

To sum it up - if you cancel mid render - psd-manager does nothing. However, V-Ray simply shows the name of the first render effect in the progress dialog, while it or 3ds max itself still cleans up memory or something else (I don't know). We discussed this way back both in the psd-manager forum and in the Cebas forum.

For reference: http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthread.php?69096-PSD-Manager-Slow-to-kill&highlight=psd+manager

We both also discussed this delay in the Cebas forum and there you made Mu********er out as the cause. I outlined some simple steps to clearly figure out what exactly triggers this behaviour. Unfortunately the thread is still waiting for your reply. So that is were things stopped.

Cebas forum thread: http://www.cebas.com/forum/index.php?topic=152.0

I'm not saying that psd-manager could not in some way trigger that behaviour. It has to request certain data from the renderer when rendering begins (G-Buffer channels). However, psd-manager is not responsible for the delay when cancelling the render. The plugin is not doing anything at that point in time - the render progress dialog display text is misleading (just put some other render effect as the first one).

Daniel

[dans]

Not going anywhere - it is around since 14 years! If you can't wait and are interested in Beta testing - send me an email to mail@daniel-schmidt.biz (same for you Bobby) and point out what you love/hate about it and we will work from there.

Just drop me an email.
@eyepiz received no mail from you so far.

Thanks