3dsMax viewport unsuable

[lolec]

I'm not used to working with huge scenes, I do mostly product rendering, but my latest project requires using a client-provided model with about 2 million polis. The viewport is unusable at around 1fps even with the quality at the lowest setting. I think the viewport is all GPUs work, but Windows GPU monitor shows a mere 5% utilization. Same for CPU. 5-10% and about 30% ram. So my system does not seem to be overloaded in any way, and yet, the viewport is unusable.  I'm running a GTX1080 in case it helps to know, max 2017. 

I know the right thing to do would be to use proxies etc... but this is a client model and I need to work on it fast, no time to rebuild.

Thanks.

[Bzuco]

3dsmax viewport is singlethreaded ...so overall 5 - 10% means that you are utilizing probably one core at 100%. If you split that 2M poly object to smaller pieces cca. 20 x 100k poly you should see more fps in viewport.

[romullus]

2 million polys should be a walk in a park for 3ds max 2017 with any decent GPU, unless it's a 10 000 objects with 100 poly each, but even that shouldn't bring recent 3ds max to its knees. There's probably more garbage in your imported scene that you can see. You could try to merge in to new scene only what's needed and see if that'll improve viefport performance.

[Bzuco]

Also if you can collapse objects modifier stack to one edit poly/mesh, do it, it helps a lot.
Some test:
2M edit poly obj. - paning viewport - 570fps (CPU core 30%, GPU 47%)
2M edit poly obj. - paning viewport with selected obj. and edged faces on - 250fps (CPU core 50%, GPU 100%)
2M edit poly obj. - moving selected polygons with edged faces - 28fps (CPU core 100%, GPU 24%)

GTX950