Max 2017/2018 horrific viewport orbit lags/freezes...

[triffski]

Hi,

I've seen this problem dozens of times over the years but really didn't expect it to be an issue with the machine I'm on at the moment. Panning and zooming are super smooth but orbiting with either the mouse or orbit tool can freeze/lag for up to five seconds before updating the viewport. I've searched the forums high and low but none of the other suggestions has made any difference. 

Spec: Ryzen 1800X/3.6GHz, ASRock Taichi, 32GB DDR4 3200, GTX 1080 w/ 384.94 driver

What I've tried/tested:

- Vanilla Max 2018 lags the same as Max 2017 with a normal setup (plugins etc)

- Nitrous DX11, DX9, legacy D3D and OpenGL all have the same problem

- Tried the last certified WHQL driver (369.26), no difference

- Panning and zooming are extremely fast (one primitive, 1000fps+), just orbiting is borked

- All view modes (Standard, Performance, High Quality etc) all freeze

- Maya 2018 is silky smooth and other apps have no issues

- Same problem in other user accounts

- Turning the grid off makes no difference

- DDU uninstall then a clean driver install didn't help

- Updating to latest chipset drivers didn't help

- Shaking fist at the screen didn't seem to do anything 😞

- No spikes in CPU usage whilst orbiting

- Changing various settings in the Nvidia control panel made no difference

- Reducing mouse polling rate to 125Hz (min) from 1000 made no difference

- 200 segment sphere with 5 iterations of Turbosmooth (40m polys) - slight lag (no freezes) with panning and the same issues with orbiting

- Disabling Enhanced Pointer Precision, View Cubes and Adaptive Degradation did nothing

- Stopping all non-essential services and apps didn't help

- I regularly do virus checks, all clean and the only thing running is Windows Defender

One odd thing I've noticed (a clue?!?) is that moving the mouse slowly seems fine but if I speed up it freezes. So I uninstalled my mouse driver bloatware (Corsair M65) but that didn't help, so I updated the chipset drivers in case it was USB related and that didn't do anything either, then I reinstalled the mouse software and lowered the polling rate as mentioned above, no joy.

Clean out of ideas so unless anyone has any suggestions, I'm off to cry in a corner somewhere*.

(* - or maybe try other random things in the hope something works)

Cheers,

triff

[triffski · Accepted solution]

Typical!

I write a post alongside tearing out chunks of hair and trying random things for three hours and then almost as soon as I post it, I stumble upon the fix. Posting in the hope it'll save someone else the anguish/late night trip to the beer shop. Well okay, you can still have a beer...

Anyway suspicions were right, it was the mouse polling rate all along. Not sure why it didn't work the first time I tried it (I've reinstalled the driver since then) but I can reproduce the issue no problem at all now.

Here's my mouse driver:

The results I get are:

125Hz: No lag

250Hz: No lag, doesn't seem any different to 125Hz but it's so fast it's hard to tell

500Hz: Pretty laggy but usable, just seems like a relatively heavy scene

1GHz: Lag central, hair coming out in lumps, monitor smashed, neighbours phoning the cops about the wailing noises etc...

I tried it without the hub and directly into USB2 and 3 ports and it's identical to the above with all. Weird that this affects Max and none of the other apps I use, but I guess that's one for whoever's in charge of the Nitrous driver...

Hopefully this might save someone some pain!

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Thank you for posting your fix here, I am creating a tracker case for this right now.

Best Regards,

[triffski]

Awesome, glad to help.

I had this problem working onsite with a client where I couldn't install this driver. In that case though, I suspect the orbit lag culprit was the 100 million poly BREP CAD model I had to work with. 😉

Are there any posts on this forum you don't respond to? 🙂 10/10 for attentiveness!

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Thanks for the kind words @triffski, that's nice of you.    I try to respond to all of them if they aren't already solved by an EE or the community members themselves.  I really care about the people in this forum and I want to help if I can.  The downside is it takes me a while to get to new threads because the volume is great.  And 100 million poly model would certainly do it!  Geez! 

Best Regards,

[triffski]

Tell me about it...  I'm from a games background, I'd happily have taken whoever did the BREP outside and shot them. 😉

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Same here @triffski.  It's funny I majored in games animation and vfx and promptly ended up in rendering and modeling because there were few people that were technical at the time.  This was way back when GI Joe was how you got GI.  Nothing like 500 lights all pointing in different angles to fake some GI.  Ah those were the days.  

Best Regards, 

[triffski]

Haha yeah, discovering finalRender then Brazil r/s around 2000 was a
massive turning point, I was at a pretty ****ty game dev studio at the time
and they were utterly blown away by the quality. No more negative
multiplier omnis etc etc to create what I guess we'd now call fake GI, like
I'd been doing all through uni.

I do remember a script that made a dome of omni lights based on an HDR, but
that was purely for performance reasons. Remember radiosity? I guess the
approach is very analogous to photon sampling and the like. Never really
looked into it (my 486 then Pentium 75 flat refused). Total insanity! 🙂

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Oh man, radiosity.  I'm so glad those days are over.  Triangles everywhere...  

I also remember having to cut geometry to trace shadows for some of the older game systems light mapping engines.  Oooh boy not fun.  We truly are blessed these days.  finalToon is still great for rendering and toon stuff, along with Pencil3.  Brazil dying was a shame though, didn't see that coming.  Also an amazing renderer.  There was a render of a VW beetle I remember which was so good that it inspired me to learn more about the photoreal renderers.  Man, what a trip down memory lane.  

Best Regards,

[triffski]

Yeah I loved Brazil, I like the flexibility of V-Ray these days (altho Redshift has become my go-to) but Brazil's approach to materials was just so much more logical. I was pretty active on the community there and very sad to see it bite the dust. Weirdly I had a nostalgic drive by their website earlier today, surprised to still see it active.

Aah, the golden days of GI... 🙂

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

I'm seeing a lot of cool Redshift and Arnold renders lately.  Very cool stuff.  It really is amazing how quickly 3D tech advances.  I seem to upgrade in 5-7 year lumps to keep my wallet from exploding, but I'm always on the lookout.  

Best Regards,

[triffski]

I see the advantages of unbiased renders if you have a 200 machine render farm at your disposal and the client is a multi-national paying hundreds of grand a month for your output. But for smaller studios where budget is more of an issue, deadlines can be tighter, there might be smaller teams with no dedicated producers and where fast creative iteration is key, I can't not see the huge advantages of biased production-ready renderers like Redshift. It's completely blown me away.

But then I guess if you have a 200 machine CPU render farm at your disposal and none of the machines have a GPU, you might not be so willing to consider blowing £200k on fitting them out with fast GPUs and completely revamping your workflow, ditching huge material libraries and retraining staff. The unnamed company to which I'm referring know what they like and like what they know, they're not very open to change. I am. 🙂

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

It's true I had to spend a lot of time learning Vray and Mental Ray in and out.  Once you get the hang of sampling and whatnot you can do damage with a smaller farm but still, your point is well taken.  For many projects absolute realism isn't a major factor anymore and even UDK is producing photorealistic renders these days albeit laboriously.  It's the dawn of a new era, without a doubt.  

Best Regards,

[triffski]

Unbiased renderers are bridging the gap between games and VFX, which is
awesome for me 'cos I have a foot in each. I don't care whether something
looks physically correct, only that it looks good. If that takes 3 minutes
to render, or I can have something that's physically correct in 20 minutes
with nothing like the speed of creative iteration, I'll take the former
thank you very much.

I'd hardly heard of Octane or Redshift a few months ago and planned to do
my current project in either Unity or UE4 for speed, but now I've got the
best of both worlds. Gawd bless ya, technology...

Please see that Autodesk don't buy Redshift and break it, thanks. 😉

[Anonymous]

I had the same issue with my Logitech gaming mouse. It was set to 1000 hertz and i got tons of lag with nothing in the view port! i saw your post and changed the polling rate to 500 and dang it was fixed! Thank you so much.

[triffski]

Glad you got sorted! I get the same problem on my work PC if I try and move the MS Word window - all the other Office apps are fine but Word lags like crazy. Windows is so temperamental sometimes... 🙂

[triffski]

Well, that's nice. I Googled "3ds max laggy orbit" after installing 2022, top result was this post from four years ago, checked my mouse driver which was on 1000Hz and fixed it in under a minute. 

Thanks, past me. 😄

[BubbaDaCaveman]

WOW! WTH I was getting horrible lags with the selection tool even on an empty scene. Luckily bumped on this post and reduced my mouse's polling rate from 1000 to 500 and it fixed it. Thanks man.

[DanielCantin]

This issue should be fixed in 3ds Max 2022.3

3ds Max 2022.3 Update Release Notes
UI: Fixed lagging orbit viewport refreshes with high polling gamming mouse. MAXX-64056