Wowsers, Max2017 seems an unwieldy beast!

[Morbid Angel]

It used to be that, maya / max back in the day were released once every few years, but they were solid releases. You could use initial version without much issues.

Since autodesk acquired both of them, they suffer from the same problem. Initial release is not usable period. It becomes usable perhaps after 4-6 service packs, in itself this idea is ridicules. Why force the hasty release of the software? Is it to drive sales, perhaps. Let's sell as much as we can, and deal with fixing stuff later. You sign a huge EULA where you wave them from any financial losses you incur due to instability of their software. This idea in itself is also ridicules. Its like buying a car without breaks, knowingly signing waver that if you crash, whoever sold it to you is not responsible for it (some one mentioned this already before).

However mentioning this, I also realize that back in the day maya cost $16000 , autodesk did bring the cost way down.

You get what you pay for

[Richard7666]

Doesn't he have GTX970 by any chance?

Does the 970 have issues with the viewport due to the shitty vRAM issue on that card? (which I can't recall the details of)

[AC5L4T3R]

In production we're currently using 2015 with Vray 3.4 but in my spare/down time I use 2017 and Vray 3.5. Viewport performance is a massive plus for me - With full car data sets (exterior and interior) in Max 2015 I get 5-30fps in the viewport whilst playing a 360 turntable. With 2017, I get smooth feedback and 90fps+ on the turn table. The layer manager is much improved - one guy recently had to ditch 2015 briefly because the layer manager is broken (and will never be fixed). I've not had any random crashes or bugs whilst using it. Although yesterday I'd imported some plant geometry from an Evermotion scene which would crash every time I tried to save the file. Wasn't able to test 2015 as I was at home.

[maxwood]

we are upgrading studio wide from 2014 this week
unsure if its a good idea now but we skipped 2015 and 2016 due to them being broken as well!

Yikes! If you considered 2016 broken, you're in for a treat with 2017.

[stevesideas]

I find 2016 pretty okay. It really does annoy me (and I've said this before) that we users pay thousands of pounds/dollars on this product and still have such a hit and miss piece of software. It's like they have totally different teams working on alternate releases of max. I remember 2009, 2012 and 2014 being good...the others iterations were not as reliable. You say that we get what we pay for but the user base since the initial releases has increased substantially. Autodesk are getting a lot of money from us but still not delivering a reliable product.

[LudvikKoutny]

Does the 970 have issues with the viewport due to the shitty vRAM issue on that card? (which I can't recall the details of)

Yes, exactly. Generally, 3ds Max 2017 viewport is significantly faster than Max 2016 - unless you have GTX970. The thing is, 3ds Max 2016 can't utilize nearly as much VRAM, where as Max 2017 viewport is built to utilize GPU as much as possible. Max 2017 fills my GTX970 to the top in complex scenes, which is generally good, as it makes drawing 3D a lot more efficient - unless you got scammed by nVidia like I did, and got GTX970, which will slow down drastically once it flows over those 3.5GB.

For example, I have this one complex scene, and I have GTX970, and my friend has GTX980. When he opens the scene in Max 2016 he gets about 80-90FPS, and when he opens it in Max 2017, he gets around 115. When I run the scene in my Max 2016 with my GTX970 I get around 60-70FPS, and when I open the scene in Max 2017, I get around 1-4FPS. Yes, it is that bad.

So while I never pass on the opportunity to kick Autodesk laying on the ground, in this case, it's not their fault, but shady practices of nVidia.

[eligiusz]

Yes, exactly. Generally, 3ds Max 2017 viewport is significantly faster than Max 2016 - unless you have GTX970. The thing is, 3ds Max 2016 can't utilize nearly as much VRAM, where as Max 2017 viewport is built to utilize GPU as much as possible. Max 2017 fills my GTX970 to the top in complex scenes, which is generally good, as it makes drawing 3D a lot more efficient - unless you got scammed by nVidia like I did, and got GTX970, which will slow down drastically once it flows over those 3.5GB.

For example, I have this one complex scene, and I have GTX970, and my friend has GTX980. When he opens the scene in Max 2016 he gets about 80-90FPS, and when he opens it in Max 2017, he gets around 115. When I run the scene in my Max 2016 with my GTX970 I get around 60-70FPS, and when I open the scene in Max 2017, I get around 1-4FPS. Yes, it is that bad.

So while I never pass on the opportunity to kick Autodesk laying on the ground, in this case, it's not their fault, but shady practices of nVidia.

HI, I also have gtx 970 although i'm using 2014 version still, but I was thinking about upgrading to 2017, do You know if there is any solution to this problem ?

[benb32]

Simply put no. nVidia, in their wisdom, divided the memory bus across the SM units (how the cuda cores are split up into descret addressable blocks). So the 980 has the full 256bit bus available across all of the cores, but the 970 (with fewer cuda cores/SMI units) only has the 256bit bus avaliable across 3.5 GB of its memory. The final 0.5 GB is only attached via a 32bit bus, as some of the memory controllers are disabled along with the reduced cuda core count. nVidia did release a driver fix to alleviate the problem, however, this mostly applied to games. In short, if the 970's memory is fully utilised performance suffers.

[LudvikKoutny]

HI, I also have gtx 970 although i'm using 2014 version still, but I was thinking about upgrading to 2017, do You know if there is any solution to this problem ?

I'd simply suggest to switch to Max 2016. It's the best 3ds Max version I've ever used. Best performance, least amount of crashes. Jump from 2014 to 2016 will give you big performance boost too, it's not just 2017 that's faster.

[Franx]

It used to be that, maya / max back in the day were released once every few years, but they were solid releases. You could use initial version without much issues.

Since autodesk acquired both of them, they suffer from the same problem...

Not that it matters in any way, but Max (and 3D studio DOS) was always AD property.

[eligiusz]

Thank You very much for all the info, You probably saved me a lot of time and hassle. And my nerves will be in far better condition

[Lupaz]

I went from 2014 to 2017. I'm very happy with it.
It's so much better! Yes, granted, you have a bug here and there, but it's been very stable so far.
What bothers me the most is that some dialog windows take too long to open, like when pressing F10, it takes a couple of seconds sometimes .

[Alex_M]

I went from 2014 to 2017. I'm very happy with it.
It's so much better! Yes, granted, you have a bug here and there, but it's been very stable so far.
What bothers me the most is that some dialog windows take too long to open, like when pressing F10, it takes a couple of seconds sometimes .

I'm really happy for you! I had to do a small job with 2017 once and got like at least 10 crashes a day. That's not including the viewport glitches and selection issues. I'm so glad we skipped this version. 2018 is at the doorstep and if its the same I'm gonna have a nervous breakdown! € 800 per seat for 2017 which we never even used - down the drain. Thanks, AD. I hope we don't make it € 1600 with 2018.

[Lupaz]

Actually the worst part is that it seems that every single command is single threaded.
It's hard to believe that they're still not using all threads in the CPU.

[jstrob]

The solution to this is to stop paying AD subscription and beg Chaosgroup to make the best V-Ray integrations for Blender and Houdini instead of for max and maya...