3DS Max, ForestPack, and Vantage CPU/GPU Load Slowdown

[jujubee]

Perhaps this is little to do with Vantage, but I have a massive terrain scene with ForestPack in 3DS Max.
The scene itself isn't bad but when I start enabling Forestpack and Railclone, then send it over via LiveLink to Vantage, GPU memory maxes nearly out then the both viewports come to a crawl. It gets even worse if I bump up the camera resolution.

Aside from rendering it out to a static .vrscene (I'm using it live to refine it) or keeping the "lower quality" Vantage preview smaller. There's really nothing else to proxy either. This happens even with opacity disabled, but it gets more painful when it's enabled. Is there something else I could do so that everything is not running so slowly?


I'm running a 3090 and 3080.
ntel(R) Core(TM) i9-9900K CPU @ 3.60GHz
64 gb ram.

Thanks!

[npg]

both viewports come to a crawl

I assume you mean the 3dsMax viewport and Vantage. When live-linked, Vantage can't update faster than the frequency of updates coming from Max. You could verify by moving the camera independently in the Vantage viewport using Vantage controls - maybe it would be smoother.

So you have one GPU with 24GB and one with 12GB and you're using both in Vantage? This means that you limit the scene to fit on the GPU with the smaller memory - each GPU has its own copy of the scene. If memory usage is over what fits on that GPU the OS will start swapping memory in and out of it, making it much slower (it may also crash). If this is what is slowing things down then maybe not using the second GPU would be faster for this scene.

To recap, there are several possible causes for a slowdown:
- The max viewport renderer is bogged down by too much geometry -> Try using box preview for proxies and instances.
- The max-to-vray exporter (and/or the Forest plugin itself) is slow when re-exporting large amount instances, like ForestPack vegetation. We've had reports about this before, it was related to animation and scrubbing the timeline. -> Try temporarily hiding the vegetation or making it more sparse if your workflow allows it, i.e. if you're working on other details.
- The VRAM is running out -> Try using only the 3090; try reducing detail in the Max viewport; close other programs (even web browsers eat some VRAM), etc.

[jujubee]

Thanks. Will give it a run. Was hoping not to add another 3090...