are there ways to make a model display faster in Fusion 360 ???

[cekuhnen]

I imported a car model (roughly 9000 patches) and Fusion is crawling.

Commands can easily also lock up Fusion - I just force quite it because waiting minutes for the selection to work is just too long.

But also with a 3000 patch file the screen refresh rate is so sluggish one cannot work in Fusion on my computer.

Are there ways to make the display faster? 

The file opened in Alias does not provide the same screen refresh slowdown at all - it is rather screaming fast.

[cekuhnen]

Also on a note the poor performance it noticeable mainly on MacOS Fusion

Windows Fusion on the same machine is much faster!

[sambirchenough]

@cekuhnen Same. So much UI lag on Macs.. 

[cekuhnen]

@sambirchenough

I am curious what the cause is.

The NVIDIA webdrivers and Apples openGL Core Profile

or

the Fusion 360 itself

You also use a custom GPU for your MacPro?

How is the MacPro vs the MacBookPro?

[sambirchenough]

@cekuhnen

My GTX 680 runs on default drivers or web drivers; makes no difference with Fusion 360 performance.

I sum up performance issues on both machines here. Because there is still UI lag on the new maxed MBP (which mostly negates MP single-core performance as a bottleneck), it seems to me that it's a Fusion 360 issue..

[TrippyLighting]

Apples implementation of openGL has never been the most performant. I also doubt that they have much interest in spending too many resources on continued development.

It's really time for Fusion 360 to transition to Metal.

I am sure that will require a lot of resources, however, dragging this further out, will only make it worse and is likely to break the promise of a natively running CAD on the Mac platform

[sambirchenough]

---

@TrippyLighting wrote:

Apples implementation of openGL has never been the most performant. I also doubt that they have much interest in spending too many resources on continued development.

It's really time for Fusion 360 to transition to Metal.

I am sure that will require a lot of resources, however, dragging this further out, will only make it worse and is likely to break the promise of a natively running CAD on the Mac platform

---

100%

[cekuhnen]

@TrippyLighting @sambirchenough

I am not sure what it is. Alias even with the display accuracy set to high is much faster than Fusion.

So from my point of view this cannot be part of the GPU or openGL.

I think this might rather come down to all the features the Fusion display offers - slowing it down.

I am just theorizing.

But this week I noticed that Fusion on a Mac even with decent GPUs just chockes on bigger files

while the surfaceBook which has a lighter GPU does not !!!

But besides that - I noticed that a 3000 face model with stitched patches runs super fast.

A model with 3000 naked patches runs super choppy.

So it is less an issue in Fusion to show the geometry but that naked patch model just crash Fusions display speed.

What is pretty embracing is that on a surfacePro 4 the same 9000 patch model  runs better than on my MacPro !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Something else must be going on. Even interacting with the Fusion UI with that model open on the MacPro under MacOS is pointless

because it does not work.

The surfacePro 4 again works pretty good - which is a crazy testament for Fusion running on that low end hardware but it blows

your mind about the macOS version.

[schneik-adsk]

Does it get faster if you switch to the "render" workspace?

[TrippyLighting]

I can only speak for my experience on my mid 2010 i7 iMac and, yes, in Render mode viewport operation is noticeably smother.

[cekuhnen]

@schneik-adsk

There is a slight UI responsive improvement with my 9000 unstitched patch model.

[chengyun.yang]

Hi,

It is a known issue that the display performance is bad with a big number of unstitched surfaces. It is related to that how Fusion handles the un-stitched surfaces. See the other post I once replied.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/design-validate-document/performance-issues-on-macbook-pro-15-quot/td...

We have already been discussing within the team to see if we should do the auto-stitching for such a model when doing the importing/translation but there are different opinions. The best tradeoff is in Fusion we provide an UI in the import dialog so the users can choose if they want to stitch the surfaces or not but so far this doesn't get very high priority in the Fusion cloud translation team.

Anyway, this is something we are already looking at. I believe we will figure out a solution for it.

Thanks

Chengyun 

[cekuhnen]

@chengyun.yang

Yeah I hope the team does. With unstitched surfaces Fusion is hard to use.

Once the model is stitched it is very fast again.

My main question is why that is so. No other app I work with has such a screen refresh rate drop when

dealing with unstitched surfaces.

[O.Tan]

Yeah, you're right. Metal is the way to go since Apple doesn't seem to be interested in supporting OpenGL: Vulkan. Though not sure how matured is Metal for MacOS is at the moment cause from what I read in the graphics forums, it seems that there's still a long way to go before Metal provides the necessary API (for those in the game industry that is). 

[chengyun.yang]

The major reason is at the moment, Fusion creates one separate body for each unstitched surface and Fusion is not very efficient to render a big number of these bodies with the current implementation(not only the display performance but also the file opening performance). For the modern GPUs, the major factor that affects the display performance is how many draw calls you send to GPU per second. Fusion does a good job to consolidate the individual faces from the same body so if these surfaces are from different bodies, then we still need to render them one by one(this is a tradeoff for the editing performance because if you edit one body you don't want to affect other unrelated bodies) and that is why the frame rate drops quickly. We have been working on some projects to support the consolidation across different bodies but that involves some low level graphics code changes and we have to be very careful. In other words, it will take some time. 

For other apps, I suspect that they treat these unstitched surfaces belong to the same body. 

I hope this answers your questions.

Thanks

Chengyun

[daniel_lyall]

And people say Apple is the way to go. Just saying 

[cekuhnen]

@chengyun.yang

Thank you for the explanation. It is very valuable as a user to know how Fusion works behind the scene

so when working on complex scenes I might better understand what to expect.

I understand that Rhino/Alias and Fusion are different philosophies in how you generate CAD data

and also that they probably deal, prepare, and present CAD data different because the modeling

workflow inherently while similar yet seems different.

At the moment based on how Fusion deals with the DATA it seems less usable for working with large

DM models when stitching/unstitching and such is often performed or working with unstitched surfaces

in general. Once the model is stitched Fusion is blazing fast rotating the model and such.

Now that is something one can be aware of and work around. I can isolate certain faces to work with

adjust the design, stitch the new work back into the body. The more complex a model the more complex the math - makes sense to a certain degree.

With a stitched model it however is still too slow hiding and showing the model.

Low or high detail level did not yield any impact on performance

http://autode.sk/2mnei0y

I hope this could be improved.

[DANIEL.HUNTER428]

Finally a solution to some of my problems (and hatred) with Fusion 360. Although I hope that Autodesk can fix the display issue with unstitched bodies because at times it is not possible for me to work with the surfaces stitched. Mainly this is due to the poor surface selection within the CAM mode.

I will say that Fusion does a much better job of stitching than Alias or Rhino so at least there is that. Glad I found this thread!

Cheers

[cekuhnen]

@DANIEL.HUNTER428

Rhino - most overrated software at all.

I would say that Alias stitching works very good while the thing is in Alias you do not really use stitching a lot in general.

Mainly stitching you would use for solid boolean operations. Otherwise Alias is mainly needs to just align the surface patches.

You can clearly see the design difference compared to Rhino which offers more solid modeling tools and thus needs stitching.

Alias is extremely precise with surface tools and thus forces you also to work in certain steps which ultimately makes the workflow

more labor intensive while giving you the ability to build what ever you want - you just need the time for it.

But for solid modeling Fusion blows both out of the water in both the UI and ease of workflow - it is a joy to use Fusion here.

The only think I really miss in Fusion is an untrim command - extend just aint the same.

[DANIEL.HUNTER428]

Yes I agree, rhino is very over-rated. U spend more time re-trimming surfaces than anything else and need to stitch everything together for filleting. I only ever use the stitch in Alias because i'm exporting it for Fusion or SW. 

For the type of work I do, Alias is hands down the best tool for the job and makes light work of complex shapes. I'd rather a complete set of surfacing tools over a pretty UI all day long. Solid models Fusion is great, but I am personally not a fan of sub-d models so the t-splines thing isn't for me.

And i hear ya on that un-trim tool. Kinda boggles my mind that Fusion doesn't have it.