Thank you for the suggestions.
I am using yesterday’s video diver. There is still more than 7 GB out of 16 GB RAM remaining as watched with Window System Monitor, including in the video card, which was checked with GPUz. I am using a lot of blocks.
I am recreating a 1940s art-deco diner. it’s a visual-thing, so I am using some large textures, and that could part of the speed issue. The rendering hopefully will be a background for a book cover. Superimposed in front of the diner will be real-life model people, so my very, very best photo-realism is still only going to look, at best, dreamy once you can see what’s, or really, who is real, against what I have made.
Though, those textures are still small compared to what the video card can handle, but when I use Cycles, memory is an issue because the video card also likely has to hold the render buffer, so things don’t have to keep hopping over the PCIe bus. Still, checked with GPUz, I am not out of the GTX 1080s 8GB of video-card memory–even at 4k, likely even at 8k.
Even though this computer doesn’t have ECC RAM, and it’s a little fussy about power, it runs pretty reliably, for an old Sandybridge, which is 70% per core as fast as the fastest modern processor. More cores would help during rendering, and perhaps even Cycles use, but when I am rotating the scene, it’s likely up to the video card, and just a few cores.
I suspect that complexity is a matter of perspective. Someone from McNeel also reports the going isn’t too fast on the project that I am working on. I’ve done several layers of optimizations for rendering speed. Almost everything has a hand-tweaked custom mesh, adjusted given to the objects viability rendering, though I don’t want to detach the meshes because that causes an exponential organizational problem.
(Cycles has been putting out some surprisingly good rendering quality, during screen capture. I’ll likely post one today.)
I also designed a machine with the complexity of lawn tractor for a series of patent drawings, in which I wanted more performance, as well. The machine had thousands of parts, almost every one blocked.
I am sure that a lot of people are happy with the Rhino viewport speed, but when there are thousands parts, triangle count becomes an issue. When making large objects, fill rate becomes an issue. When you need to use bump-maps, texture passes becomes an issue. When you need to fool the eye, or when you need a large render, then texture size becomes a problem. On what I am working on, a cropped rendering needs to look good poster-sized.
There are things that can be done to make the viewport faster, such as mentioned in the OP. Rhino 3D is a big program. I think of it as a system. There must be millions of lines of code. Everyone wants and expects everything from it, and that places demands on the people who make it. There is a saying that sometimes the obvious eludes the genus. And if, I as a user, notice something little that might have been missed, then I’ll try to do my little community member value-added thing.
With that stated, I’ve been cranky lately about the viewport speed, and well, a bug or two, and I complain, but I am not going to just complain, I am going to do what I did, and also try to work through things, and help out. McNeel might not always like the nature of my help, and I am not always the most diplomatic person in the world…especially when I only get to make one material change a given minute, but I try to trudge onward. And when I make a suggestion to that proposes to fix a problem I have, people here oppose me.
I went through over 120 hours of Grasshopper tutorials, and I did perhaps another 40 hours of experience, and could only find a few shortcomings in what must be a work to be very proud of. Yet I did find a few things. I think they were: a line-cutter, a spiral command, and a line-midpoint, with the last one being for legibility. 160 hours to notice only those changes, but when I did mention them, people voice there opinion, as it is their place to here on a forum…repeatably against something, in one case that other people wanted too. It’s interesting.
[I have been using Rhino3D for some 12 years. I’ve made more than 83 projects. Most of them are small; others are not. In that time, I wanted and asked for: texturing per face, a better block manager, the Dragline centerpoint tool that Pascal scripted for me that’s so useful, I use every day, a callout labeling function, node/vextex edting on a polysurface NURBs object like Radiant could do, a cordon exclusion viability function like Worldcraft/Radiant could do, and a way of selecting/excluding objects by type, and one more thing, I mentioned but haven’t had the time to write up. But that’s not a lot missing 12 years, or 1.5 average marriages.
Unless you have used Maya, StudioMax, 3 computer game level editors, a few old versions of Autocad, DesignCAD, FormZ, Vectorworks, and a few other open source and shareware triangle modelers, you likely have no idea how good and what could be done with Rhino’s toolset.]
I think that with Rhino’s tools, people could make more complex and large objects than the average user makes, but I found not only a bottle neck, but a way to make it better, so I go on the forum and make a post. I am reminded was Ani Defranco who said, “Wherever you stand someone will stand against you.” Having an inquisitive nature, sometimes, I wonder why they do.
If you find the videoports plenty fast enough, then why did you read this thread? : )
Were you worried that the viewports might become too fast?
