Poor viewport performance during navigation on 5,1 Mac Pro with GTX 680

[sambirchenough]

My 12 core 3,46ghz 5,1 Mac Pro with 48gb of ram is still a beast for CPU rendering. However, with its GTX 680, Fusion 360 viewport navigation performance is much worse than my iMac & MacBook Pro (GTX 780M & Radeon Pro 460). All 3 are 4gb graphics cards.

Only on the Mac Pro do the edge lines (shaded with visible edges visual style) disappear during navigation and take a second to reappear once movement stops. I'm driving a 4k display but "use high-resolution graphics" is unchecked. Unchecking "limit effects during navigation to maintain framerate" leads to an unusable framerate. The latest nvidia web driver for the card makes no difference.

Any insight here would be much appreciated. Do I need to upgrade the graphics card?

[sambirchenough]

@cekuhnen maybe you have some knowledge to drop on this?

[cekuhnen]

@sambirchenough

**** you for that nice MacPro.

do you have boot camp installed? Could you test the card under win10?

I have two GTX 970 which are newer gpu models - so I am curious about Nvidia drivers for more modern macOS versions.

do you run Sierra? I noticed in some apps a significant speed up . I use duet display to turn my ipadpro into a Wacom and it is much
faster than unde al capitan.

also are two modes that can be used for OpenGL in fusion. OpenGL and the profiler option.

@jeff_strater could one I yo explain the difference in the openGL setting again? 

[sambirchenough]

@cekuhnen Hahaha. Its beyond sad that the most powerful Mac you can get (for stuff like rendering) is from 2010..

No bootcamp. I'm on latest Sierra and have tried Nvidia web driver as well as the stock Mac OS driver.

If I can't get the 680 to work better (which I really don't understand why it won't), I was thinking about the 970.. I really don't want to dump more money into such an old computer though. You have to wait for the latest web drivers before each OS update with the 970, correct? Also no boot screen?

My 680 is flashed but I still don't get a boot screen using DisplayPort 4k @ 60hz. It's nice to not have to worry when OS updates roll out though.

[cekuhnen]

@sambirchenough

The GTX 680 is a 2GB card. From my experience to be fair and honest Fusion 360 view port is pretty resource hungry and not as fast as some other 3D engines.

So I could imagine that this could be one bottle neck.

Too bad you don't have win10. Would be nice to see. I noticed no difference between macOS or Win10 with my cards and complex designs to be honest.

And yes I don't see the boot screen - always annoying - but ah well one a year an update (old card in update new card back done)

I just bought stock PC cards.

But to be honest Phil of Jeff I think can provide better technical insight.

[sambirchenough]

@cekuhnen

There's a 4gb version as well, that's the one I have. I hear you, it definitely seems like Fusion 360 is less resource efficient than other programs in a few ways (am I the only one that can't seem to get a smooth data panel show/hide on any computer?).

Maybe I'll install windows to test it there.

[cekuhnen]

@sambirchenough

Tomorrow I will have access to surface Book and can check it there.

I must say that I have the feeling that UI wise the iMacs at school run macOS smoother

than my MacPro with GTX 970.

I am sure that has something - or at least I assume if I am right - to do with the fact that Apple

tailors the drivers to be work well with their OS while the NVIDIA webdrivers or not from Apple

and maybe are not as refined.

Maybe that can be the reason for your poor Fusion as Fusion uses Apples OS here.

[sambirchenough]

@cekuhnen Thanks.

I ran Fusion 360 through various tests the other night simultaneously on my new MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac Pro. (I'm replacing the iMac with the new MacBook Pro but haven't gotten rid of it yet). They all had their slight strengths and weaknesses in certain areas. It is extremely frustrating that none of these machines run Fusion 360 amazingly; a complex fillet will slow them all down (and none of them show/hide the data panel smoothly haha).

This is the most powerful laptop Apple makes, and I don't know.. maybe a $10k 2013 Mac Pro would perform better than my iMac and Mac Pro? I doubt there'd be that big a difference though. I guess I need to face the reality that there is no professional Mac OS solutions for me to run my business on. The OS was / is so good compared to Windows.. Ugh.

[sambirchenough]

@cekuhnen your MP doesn't have viewport performance issues does it? People on MacRumors are saying its likely a single-thread performance issue as the CPUs are so old. If your machine doesn't have the problem, it must be the GPU.

[sambirchenough]

@cekuhnen btw, I was wrong. My GTX 680 is a 2GB card. My mistake!!

[cekuhnen]

Can you do me a fav and screen record the issue?

Either with the iPhone holding it still or using a screen recording tool that is very gentle to resources.

I am curious about how your lag looks like.

[sambirchenough]

@cekuhnen

You can see the edge lines disappear during navigation and then reappear once movement stops (the framerate isn't an issue, that's just screencast). On my other Macs, only the shadow disappears during navigation and reappears immediately after; this doesn't bother me.

[cekuhnen]

@sambirchenough Do you think it would be possible to share the file with me?

I would like to test it in two systems to see what the performance there would be.

can you also make your screenshot graphic settings as well as 3D viewport effect settings?

[sambirchenough]

@cekuhnen

It's not a file specific problem, I get this behavior on any and all files but I have attached the thing from the screencast. It's just a test model I was using to benchmark various commands and actions while comparing machines.

Something I just noticed is that the edge lines re-appear faster when using the mouse and orbit tool compared to using my SpaceMouse. When using the orbit tool, they reappear almost instantly after any view movement.

Appreciate your time and help mate!

[chengyun.yang · Accepted solution]

When Fusion detects the frame rate is not good enough, it will try to use the following logic to improve the performance during the navigation:

1. Degrade some visual effects(e.g., Ambient occlusion, ground shadow, etc) during the navigation

2. If the performance is still not good enough, then Fusion will not render the edges during the navigation

I think the reason for the poor navigation performance on this machine is your GPU card only has 2GB video memory but you have a relative high resolution display. To verify it, you can try to reduce the Fusion window size to see if it makes any difference. Another thing you can try is to switch to use OpenGL core profile driver by going to Fusion preference dialog->General tab->Graphics driver. Note: you need to restart Fusion to get the new driver to take effect. 

Let me know if this helps.

Thanks

Chengyun

Fusion Development Team

[sambirchenough]

@chengyun.yang

Using the OpenGL Core Profile works! Thank you!!

With the graphics driver on "Auto-Select," even the smallest window size possible still has edges disappearing during navigation.

Is there a disadvantage to using the Core Profile driver? It does seem like the framerate isn't totally fluid all the time. Sounds like I need a better graphics card?

EDIT: Okay, whats event crazier is that the framerate seems better with "Use high-resolution graphics" checked. Maybe I'm imagining this though..

EDIT 2: Even with "limit effects when graphics memory is low," the framerate isn't too bad using the Core Profile driver!

[cekuhnen]

@chengyun.yang@sambirchenough

So I tested this on GTX 970 macOS and GTX 965M win10 (surface Book).

MacPro 2008 recording:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byzv_NlyKp_2SGdJdklZbk1ldlU/view

Following observation:

With all effects on settings, the will all be turned off when rotating the view. On each device.

Compared to your device the the difference is that on your side the visual FX take a sec longer to show up.

I found that rotation on your device is fine. To be honest I find many of the visual FX like shadows etc gimmicks (in any system)

that only impact performance. Anti Alias and if needed Ambient is what I only have on. The rest is just off.

The the view port is much much more responsive.

You can see that the edges remain visible in most cases - note that I am screen recoding this in addition so this might impact Fusion.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byzv_NlyKp_2UG84LWg2bkVXUFk/view

[cekuhnen]

@sambirchenough

Where is ""Use high-resolution graphics"" in the preferences ???

[chengyun.yang]

This option is only visible if you have a machine which supports Retina display. Otherwise you will not be able to see it. 

[sambirchenough]

@cekuhnen

I think it's only there if your screen is over a certain reso because it's not on my iMac (2560) but it is on my Mac Pro (4k).

Thank you so much for taking the time to test all that, I really appreciate it.

I'm testing complex models now and the edges remain visible with the Core Profile driver. I'm so happy!