The NVIDIA+Maya slowdown problems, a small report

 

 
Those of you that has been using a NVIDIA card with Maya has surely experienced the terrible slowdown problems..

They are usually triggered when you go into the PaintEffects view and paint something, when you go back to perspective view, the slowdown has appeared. And even if you delete all strokes etc. it is still there!

If you switch back to the painteffects window chances are that this will run very well...
This puzzled me, so I started investigating..
 

You have probably noted, that if you run in 4view there is no slowdown... So I though that was a good place to start.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

No slowdown here!!

Using the viewport resizing with the center '+' of the 4view, I tried to make the different viewports bigger.
And this is where I noticed something very very strange!!!
 
 
 
As long as you have at least 1 (one) line of the other views visible, there is _no_ slowdown!!!! 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Also, if you first scale up a viewpane by this method, you can then maximize it without having slowdowns...
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

.


PFX view scaled up
no slowdown here either, note the thin line at the top


Persp view scaled up
note the thin line at the bottom, no slowdown


 
 
 
But onece you scale the view to a size where nothing of the other views are visible, you are prone to slowdowns....
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

PFX view scale up too much!!
though being 4view, since the view is scaled so the other view(s) are not visible, slowdowns are coming

persp, scaled up too much
again, slowdowns

 

Why??? I assume it has something to do with memory transfer to-and-from main memory? The reason why PFX triggers it I assume to be because it uses a lot of mem to all of its planes?

In any case I think, based on these observations,  it ought to be possible to construct drivers that does not slowdowns..
 
 

I have tried with a lot of the beta Detonator drivers off http://www.3dchipset.com/ these are usually very good, and something like 7.58 runs _much_ better than the 'certified' 6.50, I have also tried 10.80 and 11.01, I have not made any speedtests, but they seem to run very well aswell.

This test was performed using the Detonator 10.80 on Win2k on a geforce 256

  !!!!!!!IMPORTANT!!!!!!!!!!! preliminary tests suggests that Detonator 11.01 on Win2k handles all above situations without slowdowns!!!
I'll check ImagePlanes next...

regards                         
Søren 'kurgan' Jacobsen