Hardware usage

[Judicator]

Hi, guys

I have a certain scene with some objects and particles, the usual stuff. It became kinda heavy though. I have to wait quite some time to scrub through timeline or even select objects if the app won't freeze on me.
It looks like SoftImage (I'm using 2012) can barely handle the scene, but I can't understand why. When working with the scene it doesn't use CPU and it uses almost no RAM (~3-4Gb out of 32). So what the hell does it use? And why is it so slow? It doesn't make any sense. Maybe it's the graphics card?
Any opinions are welcome. I'd upgrade the machine if I knew which part needs to be upgraded.

[mattmos]

If you're talking about rotating in the viewport, then yes, the graphics card will be the culprit - what have you got at the moment?

Also, are you in shaded mode, wireframe, bounding box?

[Judicator]

If you're talking about rotating in the viewport, then yes, the graphics card will be the culprit - what have you got at the moment?

Not just rotating in viewport. Working in general (like selecting objects, moving them, editing properties etc). Everything is lagging.
For the moment I use NVidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti (2Gb).

Also, are you in shaded mode, wireframe, bounding box?

Shaded mode.

[mattmos]

That's not a great card, the 6 series is a bit crippled compared to more recent versions (or even the older 580 series). I'd look at a 780 if you can stretch to it, or even a titan.

However, there are ways to work with larger scenes, primarily going down to wireframe or bounding box to do your moving around, or even placing elements on layers so that you can hide background stuff that's not relevant in the viewport. Softimage is generally set up to work well with huge polygon counts on a small amount of models, but it doesn't cope so well with a huge number of objects visible in scene.

[Judicator]

That's not a great card, the 6 series is a bit crippled compared to more recent versions (or even the older 580 series). I'd look at a 780 if you can stretch to it, or even a titan.

Thanx, I'll look into it. How big is the impact of a graphics card in general when working with XSI? What does it exactly do?

However, there are ways to work with larger scenes, primarily going down to wireframe or bounding box to do your moving around, or even placing elements on layers so that you can hide background stuff that's not relevant in the viewport. Softimage is generally set up to work well with huge polygon counts on a small amount of models, but it doesn't cope so well with a huge number of objects visible in scene.

That's the problem. I always have a huge amount of objects. Guess i need to work on my ergonomics skill.

BTW, there's one more question. Comparing the performance, bugs and most common tools, is it worth upgrading from 2012 to 2014? It costs quite a bit so I'd like to have some details. Autodesk web-page doesn't give much information.

[mattmos]

Normally I'd say a graphics card isn't that important in the scheme of things - but with large scenes you do start to see some differences, and it will affect selection time for components as well. A decent nvidia gaming card is usually fine.

I'm using 2014sp2 daily now, and have found it pretty stable, no major gotchas (apart from a compatibility issue with 2014sp1 for some renderers). Then again I haven't tried ice syflex yet which appears to need some kinks ironing out.

As an upgrade from 2012 I'm not sure it would be worth it however. The things I actually benefit from are improved modelling selection tools, some ice improvements, and proxy param keys being shown on the timeline. If you were going to take on a big crowd job I'd say go for it, or if you wanted to get stuck into cloth, it might be worth it, even if it still needs work.

There's really no killer improvements for me though that would sell it over 2012...

[Judicator]

Thanx, that was very useful!