Like the title says, it’s not running anywhere near a smooth rate. Is anyone else getting this? No matter what computer or phoenix version, this has always been the case for me.
Phoenix FD 3
Vray Next
intel i7
geforce RTX 2080ti
32gb Ram
Cheers,
L
Hey,
Is it slow when you orbit the camera around your cache? This could happen if your cache is quite high res and the GPU can’t handle it - in this case you could use the Detail reduction in the Preview rollout.
If it’s slow when you scrub or play the timeline it could be because your disk drive needs to read the cache data for each frame in order to visualize it. So if your caches are big in size it will take some time for them to be read.
Cheers,
Correct it is slow when i orbit around my cache, but even then it’s only the first couple of frames of even a small low res sim.
I run my monitors using a crummy Gefore GT 710, but i have a new RTX 2080 ti i use for rendering, i would think this would have no problem with that stuff, especially a tiny test sim.
Is it possible that phoenix is looking at the wrong graphics card?
Cheers,
L
Ah yes, probably that’s the reason. The GPU preview is handled by Max or Maya so the GPU you use for the viewport will be used for the GPU preview as well.
If you switch the 2080 to be used for the viewport does it get better?
Cheers,
I can’t actually switch since the 2080 only has display ports or HDMI, where as i’m using DVI for my displays. i’ll have to test it in the future when i have the right cables. perhaps an implementation to choose GPU’s in phoenix? I’m sure there’s a lot of people in my situation with idol graphics cards.
Thanks,
L
There really is not much in common between particle preview and GPU, so not sure why Paul decides his strange advice is relevant 
Particle preview and voxel preview have Auto Reduction by default. If they get too heavy for the viewport with the GPU you use, they will bump their Detail Reduction automatically, until the viewport is responsive.
However, GPU preview does not support Auto Reduction, so for large data you can increase the reduction manually. The gpu preview is also drawn by a pixel shader, so basically the more pixels you have in your viewport that show the Phoenix simulator, the more calculations it would do. So the size of the viewport, the number of viewport where you draw the gpu preview, and your screen resolution might cause it to draw slow.
Unfortunately, 3ds max’s viewport tries to be universal and so we don’t have direct access to the gpu. A standalone voxel preview prototype we quickly wrote runs several times faster than the Max and Maya viewports, so unfortunately this is how it goes currently 
Well, you never know, why smth is not working. Just thought that it is somehow linked. 1million particles just cant be slow nowadays. But, maybe it is on todo list. Who knows…
Paul, do you keep loading caches from the network?
it may be related to the nitrous viewport in this case, is the classic still supported?
I’m using max 20… piece of crap. Network - this time nope.
