Viewport Slowdown in Mod Tool [Solved]

[Giftheck]

I'm suffering a slowdown in Mod Tool with regards to the viewports. I can't seem to find the reason for this as I have not installed any system updates as of late that would make this happen nor do I recall altering any of the options.

EDIT: It was a problem with the NVIDIA graphics drivers which I have now resolved.

[Giftheck]

Nobody? It's making it really hard to get new models in.

[Ginev]

Do you mean its kinda slow for putting more models on your map in zero editor?Or maybe i understand you wrong?

[Giftheck]

No, it's in Softimage Mod Tool. Used to be fine, now it takes a full second and a half to rotate the view or select anything in Mod Tool. Going down to one viewport helps a little bit but it's still slow.

[Ginev]

Hmm strange.I never had such a problem.I really do not know...Maybe try to reinstall it?

[Giftheck]

I might have to. It's making it difficult to envelope new models.

[Giftheck]

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the application and it has not worked. Viewports are still slow as anything.

It's possible I may have found the issue though: my graphics drivers for the Intel HD chip I have in my laptop have disappeared, so I'm going to reinstall those and the NVIDIA ones, and hopefully that will go some way to solving the problem.

[Giftheck]

In case it helps: I have tried reinstalling the graphics card drivers and Mod Tool itself and there is no change. My laptop has an NVIDIA Geforce 940M, and the display drivers are for an Intel HD Graphics 520. I have 6144MB of RAM, and I have DirectX 12.

[Led]

You might check your power settings just in case.  Set them to "performance". 

Any recent windows updates?   runnung windows 10 ?

Someone at my work mentioned the same issue with a graphics intensive program.   It was running fine, then all of a sudden slowed to a crawl.  I'm suspicious it was a windows 10 update.


Here is some rather generic recommendations:
https://www.cnet.com/pictures/10-ways-to-fix-a-slow-pc/

[Giftheck]

The only recent update I had to Windows 10 was their monthly "Malicious Software" tool.

My power setting was already at "high performance".

I'm currently going to try reinstalling NVIDIA. The Intel divers vanished from my computer unexplained and I've reinstalled those.

Curiously enough this did start after a display crash a couple of weeks back. I get random display crashes while using Adobe Photoshop CS3 (though most of the time it just flicks the screen off then back on again, this time forced me to do a restart).

[Giftheck]

After a temper tantrum from my laptop as it decided it was a god idea to install a Windows Update and restart WHILE IN THE MIDDLE OF REINSTALLING THE NVIDIA DRIVER, thus making it impossible to restart the installation until I deleted the temporary NVIDIA files on my hard drive (which required a lengthy process to reassign the permissions to my account), I managed to reinstall NVIDIA and guess what! It worked!

Looks like that crash corrupted my NVIDIA drivers and reinstalling them fixed the issue.

[Idren]

Coming from a different modeling/animation software (3ds max) This issue comes up there too.  I'm assuming that the differences aren't too great from XSI (if anything xsi seems more stable because it's not as big a program).

But viewport slowdowns happen in 3ds max for a few reasons:
1. When you're working on a large model with a ton of polys - if you try to rotate/translate/zoom the viewport too quickly it'll slow it down a lot (or crash the program because it's such a big program that it's just buggy sometimes) because it's trying to do a lot of calculations all at once for the "moving" verts and stuff.  (consider hiding pieces of the model/models that you're not currently working on to fix this)
2. If your model has coincident planes/ (2 planes/faces in exactly the same space) it can slow down the viewport rendering because it can't figure out which one to render and you get that "flickering" polygon. (move one plane slightly above/below the other to fix this)
3. Non-planar faces (polys with 4+ verts that aren't yet triangulated / aren't actually in the same plane. For ex: 3 verts in a real plane connected with one more that's slightly above the plane.) can slow down the viewports because the renderer doesn't know how to display it, and the poly ends up looking like it has a weird "bend" or something because it doesn't have defined edges/the poly isn't an actual plane. (triangulate/give your polys defined edges to "bend" across so there's no extra guesswork to be done)
4. If you've got a lot of lighting/raytraced materials that are trying to calculate multiple reflections and stuff, it can slow down performance because of all the lighting calculations that are going on behind the scenes with every move of the viewport. (maybe work in wireframe mode or something similar that doesn't display the certain textures, or put a placeholder texture in while modeling)

There are probably more reasons (it sounds like yours was a driver issue) - but if more problems like this show up it could potentially be for those reasons.  And again, I'm not sure how closely related 3ds max and XSI are, but I'd assume that similar issues can arise for the same reasons as far as viewport rendering is concerned.

Hope that's helpful!

[Giftheck]

Viewport slowdown was occuring on startup with a blank project.

I did actually figure out that it was down to Windows Update uninstalling my NVIDIA drivers in an attempt to install new ones. In Windows 10, you get no warning or dialogue, so I didn't know. Reinstalling the drivers has fixed the issue.