workstation unusable while rendering - was much better in the past.

[^Lele^]

This cropped up in another thread, but perhaps the slowdowns are a combo of some plugin that runs callbacks (f.e. fPro. Turn on the macrorecroder in the listener, fiddle with the scene, and check the printouts.), and the security tools for Maxscript.
I have the latter off at all times, as i decidely do not like the idea of background processes when productivity is concerned, and have never experienced the slowdown.
Could someone with the issue check if the above could be a factor?

[Pixelcon]

I'll try that from Monday onwards. Are you using a threadripper?

edit: Didn't work for me.

[^Lele^]

I have an old 1900X at home, and routinely use a 3990X VIA vpn, for the grunt work.
Smooth as butter despite the VPN connection.
It's also a machine shared among many users, as needs arise, and it ought to be as messy as they come, for the way Max is used and the number of plugins and scripts installed in one or the other account.
Yet, nothing at all of adverse to report.
EDIT: It occurs to me it's maintained by our exceptional IT. Could it be some NUMA setting or otherwise Bios configuration?

[Neilg]

Jumping in on this, our entire studio is having this issue since moving to vray 6 and max 2023.

It's such a strange issue - we'll be able to work fine for days, multiple copies of max open, test renders, longer renders with high settings - then at some point, clicking the render button locks the entire machine up until it's finished. Theres no way to cancel, the mouse sort of moves but takes full minutes to catch up with any movement. Once the issue starts, it happens across all max instances until the machine is restarted. Closing all copies of max and opening just one instance has the issue persisting. After a restart we get anywhere from a half a day to two before it starts again. It's not scene-specific.
I did the load plugins change and it still happens.

It happens across all scenes - just now it happened in a scene that doesn't have any plugins in use, which is what triggered my 'jesus fucking christ i need to post about this' - no multi tex/floorgen, no tyflow, no forest/railclone. Just an xref full of geometry, some cameras and a sun & sky. There arent even any proxies in it yet - it's a super simple layout scene trying to figure out light/shadows and camera angles.

Windows 10 pro, 2950x, 128gb ram, but the scene it just happened in only uses 10gb.


e: worth clarifying, it looks like all the 'lag' people talk about in here and the autodesk thread are 3 completley different issues. I have no lag when opening, saving, or closing files with 2 copies of max open. I have no lag or slowdown when jumping between each copy doing day-to-day modeling tasks. the lag i'm experiencing is exclusively after pressing render. And it can barely be called lag, the machine becomes completely unresponsive - i often dont even see the buckets, it locks up after the light cache and doesnt come back until the render is done. I inadvertently hit this without having a region on for a 20 minute render and the only option was to hit the power button or wait for it to complete.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

We have the same issue here, mainly seen on 3990X.

Our lag is similar as Neil described...several days great work and the all of the sudden everything takes ages....slow closing/openin max, slow vfb, slow rendergin. etc. But everything is stoppable and closable. But i have to restart machine for it to work again.
Started eversince we jumped on vray 6 and 2023 MAX thats a thing i can safely say for sure.

I have also noticed, that sometimes you can see an instance of MAX running in the background hanging there and everytime you shut it down i restarts itself.
While i do believe this is MAX issue, it directly affects Vrays performance. and everything that goes with it...mtl editor, tabs etc....everything is TIMES slower.

M

[Joelaff]

That is pretty much what we are seeing. Difficult to determine what triggers it, but it does seem to take a restart to fix it. We are now seeing it in Max 2021.

I wonder if there wasn't some windows update that caused it, or the later NVidia drivers or what. Never seemed to have this issue until recently, perhaps from the 4090, or drivers associated with it (which many people would also use on other cards of course).

I should add the both interactive rendering and background rendering via Deadline (Backburner style) seem to exhibit the issue. Rendering (not IPR, but actual rendering) inside of Max seems to be the least likely to trigger the slowdown. IPR is triggering it all the time, making IPR next to worthless.

[Joelaff]

I was also wondering if it might be related to .tx textures.

[Joelaff]

I have been using the stable build from Dec 24, 2022, and it seems to be MUCH better!

EDIT: Much better for interactive. Still very slow when rendering in the background via deadline/backburner.

Can we lower the thread priority for net rendering? It hardly makes a lick of difference in terms of total render time, but it screws everything up on the machine.

[Joelaff]

I seem to be writing to myself on this thread, but three things helped a lot on this end.

Upgrading from 2021 to 2023 Max ( I know many of you have the problem in 2023, but it is faster than 2021.)

Upgrading to the latest nightly of vray after Dec 30. (biggest improvement)

Settings the Nvidia drivers to maximum performance mode.

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answ...um-performance

[Pixelcon]

I seem to be writing to myself on this thread, but three things helped a lot on this end.

Upgrading from 2021 to 2023 Max ( I know many of you have the problem in 2023, but it is faster than 2021.)

Upgrading to the latest nightly of vray after Dec 30. (biggest improvement)

Settings the Nvidia drivers to maximum performance mode.

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answ...um-performance

I am following so keep up the diary entries

[Joelaff]

I figured somebody would find it. Interested to hear if anyone else is seeing improved results with the NVIDIA settings and a recent nightly.

It seemed like the NVIDIA driver settings fixed a pretty big lag I was having that I think was related to compiling shaders. This seemed to happen whenever Max was displaying bump/Normal maps in the viewport. It’s like it was slow when compiling shaders. Is there some blanket way to disable bump/normal in the viewports?

The nightly increased the responsiveness of IPR quite a large bit.

[RobH22]

I'm having the same issue and came here to see if anyone had any setting or parameter suggestions. I'm using Max 2023 on Windows 11 with V-Ray 6 Hotfix 3(6.00.20 build 00000). I have an AMD Ryzen 9 3950-X with GForce 4090 and 128mb Ram. I can barely move in a simple Max scene with IPR running. A couple years back I'd let IPR run all the time and Max was as smooth as glass. Somehting has changed that's runined that handy interaction.

[RobH22]

I didn´1 have this problem with AMD Ryzen 9 5900x and Quadro P5000 but as I have the general problem of a slow GUI regarding SME and Render setup window Lele (Senior member) wrote in a post , that you should manage your threads so that the first core is only reserved for 3dsMAX. Yesterday I found, that the the monitor management software DisplayFusion also is a cause for slugishness of MAX´s dialog windows. Do you use it by chance? I have two other problems with the VFB- If I do IPR there and hit render MAX sometimes doesnt react anymore. The other thing is that during IPR is running the AutoBack feature of MAX doesn´t work.
Just now Ifound an article regarding that topic in the Autodesk forum which I didn´t know so far:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/suppo...core-CPUs.html

I've spent a year periodically searching for a solution to my serious lag in Max when renering a progressive IPR. This solution seems to have solved it for me. I use a program with which I can assign which processes a particular program uses. I let Max use all but 4 of my 32 processes. When setting it up for Max I just excluded Max from the first two processes and the last two processes for no particualr reason so that other programs could utilize them. I didn't realize that there was a priority to the processes that was that important. I reassigned Max back to the first two and and excluded it from others in the middle. Like magic, I now have a pleasant experience using Max while IPR is running. I'm thrilled to have found this. Thank you 3d-laboratory.

So if others are having the issue and even if you don't use a program to manage processes, try making sure that Max has exclusive use of the first process and see if it solves the issue for you.

[Vizioen]

I've spent a year periodically searching for a solution to my serious lag in Max when renering a progressive IPR. This solution seems to have solved it for me. I use a program with which I can assign which processes a particular program uses. I let Max use all but 4 of my 32 processes. When setting it up for Max I just excluded Max from the first two processes and the last two processes for no particualr reason so that other programs could utilize them. I didn't realize that there was a priority to the processes that was that important. I reassigned Max back to the first two and and excluded it from others in the middle. Like magic, I now have a pleasant experience using Max while IPR is running. I'm thrilled to have found this. Thank you 3d-laboratory.

So if others are having the issue and even if you don't use a program to manage processes, try making sure that Max has exclusive use of the first process and see if it solves the issue for you.

Which software do you use to assign processes?

[Pixelcon]

It appears the cause of the issue has been found: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-m...t/true#M210628

Flabbergasted that Itoo say they will not issue a fix for existing versions of FP...