I tried to make a terrain (100x100 plane) with 3ds max 2012, and it was so slow! I experienced it earlier, I thought, I won’t have problem with it, since I do only low poly stuffs. But unfortunately, I need to make higher poly stuffs, and it was impossible to make because of the ridiculous slow down.
I tried 3ds max 2012 on an other PC with a little bit better CPU and with a much more obsolate videocard.
It worked really well… until I turned on “backface cull”. It became slow. On my PC, I turned off backface cull, the speed improvement was huge!
I just don’t know, why? What is the reason it is much faster with rendering both side of the faces? Can someone explain it, why?
I’m happy with this setting, a little bit annoying to see both sides sometimes, but it is much faster.
Anyway, the two computers
CPU
A.) 3.00 Ghz Intel Pentium D925
B.) 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo E4500
VGA
A.) Asus HD2600 XT (256 MB)
B.) Sapphire X1650 (256 MB, AGP)
RAM
A. )2x1GB Kingston (@667mhz)
B.) 2x1GB Kingston (@667mhz)
So “A” PC is mine, and the performance is still worse than on “B” PC. But at least, it is usable now, and I’m happy with it.
You should be posting on the autodesk forums. This is a unity forum. This forum is designed around support for unity features in external tools, not the external tools themselves.
3D modeling programs are super heavy on video performance, thus the video card IS the problem. Thats why there are workshop video cards that go for thousands of dollars, because software like 3DS max eats more GPU power than most modern games today (skyrim, rage, etc) of coarse relating to how many polygons your working with, a 256mb ram card will not cut it, and I wouldn’t get any other GPU lower than 1gb gddr5, seeing that cards are now multicore with 2gb now, invest in a decent card, possibly a 400 Nvidia series, or a 5000 series ATI.
[500 Nvidia series / 6000 ATI series is pushing it, unless your gonna be working with some serious models, save the money]
On a side note, the newest 3DS Max (2012) supports realistic shading and AO while modeling (you can remove this feature as 2011 did not have it), and your GPU is basically getting pounded on while trying to render all this in real time, this is your issue…
In this case, I don’t understand, why the other PC with the Core 2 Duo CPU and with the very old X1650 videocard why has better performance that my PC with the worse CPU (D 925), but the much better GPU (Asus HD 2600 XT)? OK, that’s right, both of them has only 256 MB RAM.
Anyway, with backface culling off, it is usable… it is still weird for me, why it is much faster without backface culling.
Backface culling has to improve speed, right? It disable rendering backfaces, which speeds up rendering. I case of 3ds max, it works exactly the opposite.
I’m using it in DirectX mode, because I have the best performance with it. Anyway, the backface culling performance problem is with all the modes (I didn’t try out software mode yet).
In DirectX and Nitrous, the performance is almost the same. OpenGL is slower a little bit.
Sounds to me as though it’s the OS stalling it or something bad is happening because 3dsmax 2012 should work fine with something as ancient as a pentium 4 with software. Something really weird is happening. I would suspect some really big conflict with your operating system / language / computer - which they should be able to spot on the autodesk forums.
Use max 11, just download it from the autodesk site, or patch max 12 with latest updates (max 12 is a mess). Any earlier version of 3dsmax should work if you download it from autodesk with your '12 license.