Max 2016: Groups cause viewport slowdown

[office]

I noticed that when you have about 200 or more objects in a group, viewport performance drops dramatically. I tested on 2 different PCs. Can anyone else try the following and report if you notice the slowdown:

1. In an ampty scene create a box and make 200-300 clones.

2. Group them. Make sure you don't open the group.

3. a) Place the mouse cursor over the group and start zooming in and out with the mouse wheel. Make sure the mouse cursor is above some of the objects in the group.

3. b) Try selecting the group. There will be a substancial lag before the group gets selected.

[eodeo]

You're onto something. I was about to post a comical no, but then I tripled the amount of teapots to 600, with 10segments each totaling 3.8m poly scene. Ungrouped it was all smooth on my i7 4770 with gtx 660. Grouped, it would lag out when I try to orbit. So I saved the file in Max 2015 format and reopened it there. Max 2015 exhibited no such problems and had 200+ fps at all times.

Confused I started back Max 2016, but I couldn't reproduce the problem. It was/is all smooth after closing 2015 and reopening 2016 with the same scene. The thing is, Max viewports report "only" 70fps now. A noticeable drop from 200fps before grouping. Still, 70 fps is silky smooth for my 60hz monitor. In Max 2015, fps never dips below 200 regardless of grouping- so clearly something is wrong with new Max, yes.

I had no problems with only 200 teapots, but now i re-checked it. With only 200 teapots and a 1.2m poly scene i get nearly 400fps. After grouping them, I get some 150fps- a noticeable drop- noticeable only through fps counter in Max viewport (7).

[eodeo]

Curious, I tried it with 2000 teapots and 12.8m poly scene. Now I get 70fps shaded or 20fps realistic. Grouped I get 20fps shaded. Interestingly, Max 2015 in this scene has 150fps at all times. Ungrouped with all teapots selected, fps falls down to ~100. Realistic, unselected, Max 2015 has 50fps. Selected and realistic, fps hovers between 30-50fps.

Anyway, Max 2015 clearly has the upper hand in this situation.

[spacefrog_]

Don't put too much trust into the built in FPS display. It's lying. Another thing: turn off all other statistics display ( vertx/poly/edge counts ) as they tend to hurt playback performance, at least if some complex modifiers are involved.

Regarding the group slowdown thing:

Indeed there's something happening:

testscene here drops from 24fps down to 14 fps, as  soon the teapots are grouped ( 3650 noninstanced teapots). Don't know whats going on, but some optimization seems to break when objects are grouped ..

[spacefrog_]

Yeah seems some general performance regression

i get 30fps with the scene loaded in Max 2014 ( grouped or not ), and similar with Max 2015

BUT:

in Max 2016, working with the grouped scene is insanely slow. This is by far more problematic than the playback performance, it's almost unusable slow, so please report THAT problem as a regression. in Max 2015 everything happens in 1sec, in Max 2016 it takes somewhere beyond a minute ( did'nt measure exactly ). Seems mostly be connected to selecting/unselecting the group

* Hardwarehittesting enabled/disabled does not influence the slowdown

* Toggling the new selection outline does'nt influence the problem

[office]

Ok, so clearly there is a problem. Having the statistics on or off made no difference to me and with 300 cubes I can clearly notice a big decrease in performance and this is very strange since my PC is pretty modern (check my signature). Moreover, this release was hailed to have improvements in viewport performance but in fact there is a regression.

I suggest we submit a bug report for this so it can be fixed.

EDIT: I just did. Case ID: 10698512

[rawalanche]

It's probably the scene explorer. Already in Max 2015 SP3 they introduced a severe bug that was affecting scene performance in a negative way. I reported it TWICE but (as usually) it probably did not get through. 

In 2016, i get quite bad playback performance in scenes that rely on groups heavily, but everything is on par with 2015 as soon as i close scene explorer. 

Ever since new Scene Explorer was introduced, it's been just problems on top of problems for me, so i fell back to using good old outliner script. 

[spacefrog_]

---

@rawalanche wrote:

It's probably the scene explorer. 

---

doubt it - happens with ripped out scene explorer too...

@office: there are undeniable viewport performance improvements, even more is happening under the hood

Those changes are necessary to bring the viewport system in Max towards mroe flexibility

Such bugs spoil the good  impression of course and such a major bug should definitely have been catched by Autodesk's internal QA

But one thing proves to be true again:

never use any large package in production until the first service release...

Thats true in any area and any package

[rawalanche]

Hmm, just checked again. It does not indeed help with the lag before each view transform, but it definitely helps a lot with playback performance on any heavier scene.

[spacefrog_]

---

@rawalanche wrote:

Hmm, just checked again. It does not indeed help with the lag before each view transform, but it definitely helps a lot with playback performance on any heavier scene.

---

By "ripping out scene explorer" i literally meant ripping it out of the Max installation, not just closing the window

That means removing the relevant assemblies, DLL's  and the macroscripts. Max still works under this circumstances, but of course the menu and toolbar entries become defunct.

Possible selection callbacks etc.. into Sceneexplorer code could not get triggered in that case. So sceneexplorer internal code can be excluded from being the cause, as  the performance drop  still occurs on closed groups in that situation. 

[rawalanche]

Yes, as i wrote in my preview reply. Scene explorer does not affect the group slowdown problem, but it does affect playback performance in my scenes. If i close scene explorer in some of my more complex scenes, playback framerate almost doubles.

[VishnuR]

Hi everyone 

I can reproduce the initlal report and this is now logged with 3ds Max engineering.

No fix date determined but good its logged and under review now.
Missed a small step earlier but included now and its a very reproducible issue in 2016 but not 2015.

Repro steps:
<<
1. In an empty scene create a box and make 300 clones.
2. Group them. Make sure you don't open the group.
3-After grouping the objects select and deselect the group about 10 times.
Notice that each time you do this, the group gets selected progressively slower with a lag before it is selected.
This does not happen in 2015, only in 2016.

Some users also report after doing above:
lag in zooming and orbiting if the mouse cursor is on top of some of the objects in the group.>>

Thanks for reporting this and the precise steps to help us reproduce it.

10702806

VR

[remi.ruvio]

Just one more thing..

Drop the undo count to 1... no more problems..

Of course , it's not a solution ...

RR

[YVESMOREAU2311]

Any news on this matter ?

Max2016 is completely useless for me with the group bug !

[eodeo]

A student sent me a max file and it was unusable in 2016. CPU and GPU were both idle, but Max looked like it hanged for minutes at a time. I opened it in Max 2015 and it was silky smooth.

I couldn't understand what's wrong and then I remembered this post... His file has many nested objects. Max 2016 is truly unusable in that scenario.

[stevesideasuk]

I have taken over a project recently with hundreds of grouped objects. It's a nightmare to say the least. Max just sits there for ages doing nothing. General performance is terrible. Sometimes when just selecting a group can make max just seem to freeze. When I try to ungroup a set of objects it takes forever. I had to leave my computer doing this last night as I just couldn't be bothered to wait 20 mins or so for it to ungroup these items. I've had this many grouped items before on previous versions and it is fine. Please fix this asap. For people like my working on large projects this is just not acceptable !

[stevesideasuk]

I have literally been sitting here waiting for 6783 objects to ungroup since I wrote my last message and it still hasn't finished ! This is a joke !

[spacefrog_]

Yeah - it's a pretty serious issue . So please REPORT REPORT REPORT REPORT !

[Steve_Curley]

For anyone just out of hibernation...
Help > Speak Back > Report a Problem, or http://www.autodesk.com/3dsmax-DefectSubmission which ends up at the same place.

[stevesideasuk]

Thanks. I'll do that.