is this UI sluggishness normal?

[romullus]

- Isolation freezes 3dsmax for 5+ seconds
- corona sun changes position after opening file

These two issues are fixed in Corona 12 daily and to my knowledge both should make it to 11 hotfix.

[_fosafosa]

Thank you.
I edited my previous post.

I am pretty sure it's also Autodesk fault, some files created in 2024.1 "obsolete data found "pop up compatibility warning in 2024.2 for ever...

Edit: I am deeply moved by how corona 11 scatter has a huge  impact on the smoothness of the entire interface of 3dsmax....

[danio1011]

I noticed his laggy Corona moment is with a texture that is like 7k x 12k.  I recently discovered that a lot of my material editor lag (and IR startup) in corona was due to texture size.  I have a 10gb ethernet and all assets on nas are on ssd raids, but even still with 6k+ textures (or just large pngs etc) max was really slowing down bad when running corona IR or Material Editor.  I ran the pixamoon resize script and downsized all textures above 4mb (as a test) and holy cow it’s fast again.  So perhaps it’s something about Corona and large textures?  Not sure, it’s been so long since I used Fstorm I can’t compare directly.

Thanks Juraj for pointing Control Flow Guard, I've never heard of it and it was on on my machine.

I'm experiencing the same slowdowns here on Max 2023 and Corona 10HF2.

I've never tried Fstorm, and I love Corona except for two or three options that I really liked in VRay, especially the VRayToon effect, which is sorely lacking in Corona, but here's an interesting video that explains that Fstorm is faster than Corona in IR and shows Corona's lack of responsiveness (look at 1mn40s):

It's true that if the devs could improve the responsiveness of Corona, it would be a major advancement to focus on the artistic side instead of wasting time waiting for the machine's response.

[Avi]

I tried to repro what is shown in the video using a 7k texture and making a complex material but for me it is working fine. I am using 3ds Max 2024.2 and Corona 11. I noticed that in the video the user is using Corona 7 HF 1 which is an older version of the Corona.

I am not sure but there might be cases where users might be facing a little lag due to very very high res texture, this is often expected due to the increased processing demand. However, if you find that the performance in Corona is noticeably slower compared to other renderers, we're here to help. Feel free to start a ticket with us along with your scene files and repro steps.

https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

[romullus]

Unfortunately recent Corona versions has tendency to be significantly laggy in material editor and you don't need complex scenes or high resolution textures to experience that. I have a feeling that after some time of working on a scene, material editor gradually becomes more sluggish and uncomfortable to work. Sometimes restarting Max helps for some time, sometimes not. It probably has to do with Max version as well as with Corona version. It would be very nice if such issues would be fixed sometime in the future, as the laggy UI is one of the biggest productivity killer.

[Avi]

After discussing this issue internally, we understand that in order to effectively provide a solution, we would need some scenes or screen recording or steps to reproduce the problem. Without this information, it's challenging for us to diagnose and resolve the issue.

If you're experiencing such lag/slowdown/sluggish UI, feel free to submit a ticket with your scene files and a detailed description of the steps you follow that lead to the problem. This will help us to reproduce the issue on our end and provide a solution.

[brr]

Hello Corona team!

Sorry for the delay on my side. I just tested Corona 11 HF1, and the issue I described in Reply #5 is still present.
I have uploaded my scene with a recorded video and created a ticket with ID #197426.

Best Regards

[philipbonum]

I noticed his laggy Corona moment is with a texture that is like 7k x 12k.  I recently discovered that a lot of my material editor lag (and IR startup) in corona was due to texture size.  I have a 10gb ethernet and all assets on nas are on ssd raids, but even still with 6k+ textures (or just large pngs etc) max was really slowing down bad when running corona IR or Material Editor.  I ran the pixamoon resize script and downsized all textures above 4mb (as a test) and holy cow it’s fast again.  So perhaps it’s something about Corona and large textures?  Not sure, it’s been so long since I used Fstorm I can’t compare directly.

Stupid question but, do you also have a 10Gb network card or motherboard?

I've recently tried to look at other options for storage and an internal or even an external m2 disk would be miles above what you get from a 10Gb. Curious if this would affect the sluggishness of Max. Anyone experienced with the difference in speed?

[Juraj]

In my personal experience, running file-server with 10gbit and SSDs on it for years, it was still sluggish. The reason was perhaps some inherent latency to standard network protocol, or perhaps 3dsMax introduces some additional latency when dealing with network locations, hard to know, not in my skill to investigate what is the actual bottleneck.

But local storage on workstation is indeed much more responsive in all aspects of work. For studio work though, this means synchronizing storage across multiple workstations and there are some easy real-time sync tools (like FreeFileSync), it introduces another level of complexity to fuck something up :- ). And of course, certain tools like standard Connecter don't like it (hence why they introduced SQL-based paid-tier).

My textures never even go below 4K (for 1m2) but usually are larger (8K), and I never really tested the impact on fluidness. Worth looking into it, but not sure what could be done about that, I need high-res textures. There was some proxy-tool for textures I think.

[philipbonum]

Thanks for the valuable feedback Juraj!
Autodesk is not recommending NAS according to this article at least, so I should look into other options.
https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Working-with-multiple-copies-of-3ds-Max-across-a-network-environment.html

I'm actually looking into Connecter Suite these days, and it's not without its issues... Hard to set up without doing things wrong and having to do it all again. And the fact that all users still need to have the same file path because of 3ds Max leads me to believe an external disk(ideally Thunderbolt and m.2) with the same letter is needed by all users, be it on-site or remote.

[danio1011]

To answer your question, I run intel 550 cards for 10gbit.  I have noticed when running locally things tend to be snappier, but also my network never gets saturated so I am a little surprised by that.  As Juraj says, maybe it’s some inherent unfriendliness of Max towards networks. i know they don’t technically support it (but they also don’t support multiple instances either and I am sure we all do that :)

[Aram Avetisyan]

I've had 3dsMax get sluggish on me after I do an alt+W to see all my viewports. Before I do that, 3dsMax operates smoothly, even with a complex file. But after I do that, anything I do leads to a 1-2 second lag.

Same here!

I experience an instant and significant performance drop when using "show all viewports." I mainly skipped Corona 10 and installed Corona 11 a few days ago. Yesterday, I opened a relatively simple scene created with Corona 9, then pressed ALT+W (show all viewports). The viewport performance dropped dramatically, in my case, from 50 to 1-3 FPS (CPU usage when rotating viewport goes up to 28%). I tested this on 3ds Max 2022 and 2024 with fresh ENU folders and default viewport texture resolutions.

I took some actions to understand where the problem lies:
-Changing the viewport from perspective to other views in a single window (left top corner) does not result in a performance drop.
-Changing viewport settings and texture resolutions does not help. Even with bounding box mode, I still experience 1-3 FPS.
-Importing the scene into a new one doesn't change the result. The scene is laggy from the beginning.

Currently, I don't have time for further investigations and tests, so I need to revert to the previous version (I will try Corona 10HF3 first) and finish the project.

Best Regards

UPD: installed Corona 10 HF3:
- when performing alt+W to see all my viewports, max freezes for 1-2 sec for one time (as usual) but overall viewport performance does not drop as in Corona 11. So I can continue to work with ~50 FPS

Hi everyone,

Let's keep this thread as tied to the original issue (not necessarily original message) - there is a scene, which has slower viewport performance, as described in the quote, with Corona 11 than Corona 10. This has been reproduced and reported. It seems to be related to specific object(s) in the scene. I will test it further.
Of course, any updates will be shared here as well. Currently this specific issue (slower viewport for a scene with Corona 11 than Corona 10) is being handled in a ticket submitted by Dart Design (@brr as I understand).

(Internal ID=1284851510)

[Juraj]

But this is not bug-reporting thread :- ). My Max/Corona is super-sluggish and I am still on Corona10.

This thread gave me more ideas to test certain scenarios I didn't pay attention to before, mainly:

1) Show all viewports performance
2) Alt-tab in & out

That's on top of few I listed myself on first page.

I mean working in Max has been pain for past few years, I need to figure out what everything causes downgrade. Lot of it is Corona related on Materials in Viewport.

(To be truly off-topic, I would start how damn slow latest Photoshop is! What's up with that).

[Aram Avetisyan]

You are right. I will move the specific Corona 10 vs Corona 11 slow viewport to a separate thread:
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=41834.0

Btw, the root cause of it has been found - it is texture being used with MappingRandomizer for a material, and it being previewed in the viewport. Sharing here as well for convenience and better tracking.

[Juraj]

Now that almost 80perc. of my materials feature Randomizer and Triplanar, often both in row, that is not nice news. I did want better representation in viewport (just by taking any bitmap in chain), but if it's causing  performance issues now : /