I’m currently using the Panelling Tools in Grasshopper. After applying a shape/shapes to a grid and increasing its density, the real-time update becomes very slow. Also modifying other parameters including the offset grid distance and grid attraction with a higher density grid is slow.
It’s quicker when in GH wireframe mode, but again, slows down dramitcally once over a certain grid density.
I assume this is related to my computer specification limit.
Which aspects of the hardware affect the real-time interactive update performance?
If the performance drop is caused by either preview meshing or just plain computation, the only thing you can really do to speed things up is get a faster CPU. not more CPUs, GH1 is a single-threaded application so it won’t make use of however many cores you have.
Sadly the speed increase per core has levelled out over the past few years and it is no longer possible to get truly faster CPUs, so you may well be out of luck for the time being.
To elaborate, Brian is partly correct as well. Whenever there’s a new solution in GH, two very distinct things happen:
A new solution is computed.
The Rhino viewports are redrawn.
For simple GH files, step 1 may be 1~5 milliseconds, while step 2 takes 20~100 ms (pulling numbers out of thin air here, just for a sense of scale). However for complex files step 1 will almost certainly dominate and getting a better graphics card/driver won’t help at all. If you find the viewports are responsive after a new solution has been computed, your problem is not the graphics card.
This is not the fastest CPU available, but it’s pretty close. You can buy processors up to about 3.5GHz, but they are expensive and will probably give you no more of a speed increase than 35% if you’re very lucky. So that’s not going to bridge the gap between jagged and real-time. If you find that files are becoming too slow to work with, you should probably insert a bunch of Data Dam objects to buffer the computational updates.
