UI drawing speed of VRayMtl

[timmatron]

Thanks Lele! Good to know it's a known issue and will hopefully improve someday. As far as the QT to d3d9....that's entirely greek to me. Would you be able to point me in the right direction to do that?

[^Lele^]

Sure thing.
There are the two system variables and their respective values.
You can set these in windows.
Press the windows key + R, type "SystemPropertiesAdvanced" and press enter.
At the bottom, Click "Environment Variables".
Below the "System Variables" window, click "New..."
Put QT_OPENGL as variable name, and Angle as variable value.
Press Ok to save it.
Press "New..." Again, and this time use QT_ANGLE_PLATFORM for name and d3d9 for value.
Press OK 3 times to save and close the windows, and reboot.

To revert to Max's own defaults, delete the system variables you just set, and reboot.

[timmatron]

Thanks very much!! I'll give this a whirl and see how we do.

[flat]

Mr. Lele Thank you for the details.

Your research will be useful to many people. I will also introduce this method in my blog post.

[timmatron]

Today has definitely been much better. I wasn't working with materials a lot today but I noticed when switching through maps it seemed to be pretty smooth. Overall I'm loving the upgrade. Have noticed a few other quirky things but I'll keep my mouth shut for now, while I'm still getting used to everything. Thanks again Lele.

[3d-laboratory]

Dear Lele, thank you very much for the explanation. This is exactly the answer I wanted. Now I can stop looking around, if there is another cause for this. So I also understand, why the render setup window also needs a lot of time to pop up. What I dont understand: you said, that the changes to Qt were made after 2016. But under Windows 7, with Max2019 and VRay Next I didn´t had these problems. As I also heard of Qt the first time. I gathered some information about it. In Wiipedia I found the following sentence: "Qt is a widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces as well as cross-platform applications that run on various software and hardware platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android or embedded systems with little or no change in the underlying codebase while still being a native application with native capabilities and speed." This is what I meant above with the blown up software: when sombody tries to develope a software that runs on every software platform it surely has to have more code to meet the needs of all these platforms and has it limitations regarding performance (in my opinion). I will try your suggestions today....

[Morne]

Sure thing.
There are the two system variables and their respective values.
You can set these in windows.
Press the windows key + R, type "SystemPropertiesAdvanced" and press enter.
At the bottom, Click "Environment Variables".
Below the "System Variables" window, click "New..."
Put QT_OPENGL as variable name, and Angle as variable value.
Press Ok to save it.
Press "New..." Again, and this time use QT_ANGLE_PLATFORM for name and d3d9 for value.
Press OK 3 times to save and close the windows, and reboot.

To revert to Max's own defaults, delete the system variables you just set, and reboot.

Hmmm nice. Would be nice to get this scripted as either a maxscript or batch

[dans]

One thing about switching materials in the compact material editor. If you switch between materials/maps of the same type a plugin does not need to recreate its whole UI. It can just set the values of all UI controls to the values of the material you switched to. That is a standard practice in 3ds max maps/materials and other plugins to speed things up. For example the 3ds max Bitmap & VRayBitmap do not use QT and switch fast with the technique I described.

VRayMtl destroys and recreates all UI controls each time one switches between two materials of the same type. So any slower UI creation and drawing speed will have a significant impact because of this.

Daniel

[3d-laboratory]

Thank to Lele´s method I now can work a lot better. I would say, the time improvement is about 50% with the CME and the Render Setup pops up very much quicker now. Thank you Lele!

[olly]

Adding the two environment variables did not improve the lag on my system.

Is there a way to verify the setting is working?

^Lele^ sorry for hijacking the feature thread

[^Lele^]

Adding the two environment variables did not improve the lag on my system.

Is there a way to verify the setting is working?

^Lele^ sorry for hijacking the feature thread

No worries, i stepped in to not start the discussion on this there too. No harm done!

Maybe AD itself changed their Qt driver to d3d9, with the most recent max versions.
Or maybe your CPU/GPU combo was as quick as it could get using the AD default, it's hard to know.
I built myself a benchmark script to test a few tasks (simple enough pseudo code: start a timer, open the render settings, stop a timer, repeat a few times to get meaningful averages.), which is why i know the d3d9 driver was the best option.
But it was the best option for my CPU (1900X) and GPU (1080), only: i have no data on anyone else's setup, i'm afraid.

[flat]

The change is slight. It doesn't change dramatically.

It's an improvement in my environment. Compare with post1.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gaJ...ew?usp=sharing

[^Lele^]

Yeah, the change is around 30 to 50% improvement per control type (i.e. dropdown list, spinner, button, mapbutton and so on.).
On the V-Ray Material UI, specifically, at the time of testing the combo resulted in a non-negligible drop from ~1400ms (or, around 1.4 seconds) to less than 1000ms (or, less than a second.).
With d3d9, as well, there is less "fatigue" kicking in from repeated redraws (i.e. long sessions), which is bigger with all the other methods.
It's still present, however: something clearly leaks, but it ain't something we can see or influence, at all.
Moving to max 2022 makes nigh no difference to translation or performance, for us.
Keep the max sessions as short as you can, and reboot max often is all i can suggest for this.

All this said, the Qt physical material opens ten times quicker, at less than 100ms, in *any* driver mode.
It's all down to the AD's translator, and its vagaries, i'd think.
We will have to go Qt, there is no shaving time from the translator.

[flat]

sorry Mr.Lele
My post #42 is a reply to olly's post 40.

[^Lele^]

Yes, thank you very much for that, dear Sir.
I took the opportunity to share the numbers i had from testing the material UI, which were previously private.