Softimage Performances

[Maximus]

Hey, i'm opening this thread for some questions that always bothered me in years but I never had the chance to put them.

What I would like to know is your personal experience on some situation i'm gonna expose here and how softimage performed overall. Included your workflow of doing such operations.
My main concern is Softimage Performance when it comes to ICE / Instances / particles number / simulation.

Since its not my area of expertise I didnt really work a lot with those things in ICE, but lately due to having free time and trying some things myself I had quite a surprise on how horrible this software is in terms of performance at least to me.

First of all, my machine is an intel i7 990Xtreme overclocked at 4ghz, 12 cores, its not really a bad machine, I have 24 gb corsair ram 800mhz, and a nvidia GeForce 570 HD 1.2gb vram, with a 120 OCZ SSD hard disk.

How is it possible that Softimage hangs and get unresponsive when i use 50000 geometry instances? I create a simple plane and use the simpliest scatter system, plug instance shape and set my shape (a grass hand modeled blade with few polygons) and then scatter it for 50000 times. Then open task manager and see: Softimage is hanging, my cpu usage is at 12%... ram usage is not eve above 10%, and software is completely unresponsive for minutes.

The same goes if I do a lagoa simulation and set a low Sim quality, softimage hangs, you cant stop the process anymore, the "simulation" progress bar gets frozen, everything hangs, and you have to kill the process from the task manager.

Its the only software I see having this issue, on every other software you can stop whatever you are doing, if for example you set a wrong parameter you can stop it, instead of having to kill it because of hanging.

The same thing goes when you work with around 1 mil+ particles, everything gets slow as hell even if your pc isnt using 1/10 of all resources. This is what bothers me. Softimage isnt using my resources at all, and still hangs. what on earth is going on?

How is it possible that a software that made ICE its core, performs so ridicolously bad on those operations? What are your experiences on those fields?
I know that a lot depends on users, for sure I'm not here to scatter a buddah with 3milion polygons for 50000 times, that might be understandable if it hangs. same thing i am not shooting 90milions particles neither doing a lagoa sim with quality 0.001.

Just curious how you guys found Softimage performance on those things and what machine specs you have.
What really surprised me is the fact that Soft doesnt use my system at all, and it hangs. So there must be something really wrong in here.
Btw i'm using soft 2013 sp1, and its always been like that since v 7.0.

Thank you, Max

[Bullit]

Can you provide a scene that gets you trouble to try. It seems some issue with your system, it is a good system.