Sorry but I would hardly call the 5870 crap.

I'm running windows 7 and upgraded from the AMD 5870 1 GB to a NVIDIA 670 4GB card. It's nice to have the extra video ram with modo and games,
but I tested the frame rate in MoI with the same file, settings and monitor resolution as in this thread:

http://moi3d.com/forum/messages.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5252.72

I got almost exactly the same results, 17 to 20 ms.

I would say that your problems have more to do with ram, you said your working with a 800 MB file. MoI is a 32 bit application so it doesn't matter if you have
28 GB of ram. I'm not sure how the Macs manage memory but on windows the best you could expect would be 4 GB of ram for MoI.

Hi Dan - running out of RAM with 32-bit MoI won't really have much to do with things going slower - if you run out of RAM things just won't work at all, like chunks of the model won't end up getting loaded at all or things like that. But basically things just won't work at all, it's generally not that they will work but more slowly.

The main time that running out of memory is related to running more slowly is when you have a machine that has less than 4GB of ram and it's used up all available physical ram and is using "virtual memory" instead where it's swapping chunks of existing memory out to disk in order to free up more of the limited physical RAM. That does cause a really major slowdown when that happens, but that will happen if you're trying to run a scene that uses say 1GB of RAM on a machine that only has 512MB of RAM. This "excessive swapping" type of slowdown won't happen at all on high memory machines since MoI can't even fill up the entire physical RAM to start with.

That does remind me though, there is a difference in max memory with MoI between OSX and Windows - on Windows MoI can use up to 4GB (in practice more like around 3.6GB), while on OSX it will max out at around 2GB instead. That is something that I may be able to fix, it is on my list to investigate in more detail.

I guess it is possible that if you were right almost exactly at the limit it could make for some strange operation with a lot of things ending up sporadically failing. But you'll probably end up just crashing instead of just running more slowly.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

The last paragraph referring to ram was more of a caution about working with 800 MB files in MoI and not
directly related to navigation, sorry.

MoI will do it but a user should not expect to be in the 'comfort zone' for navigation even with 24 GB of ram.

This is one of my Torus experiments, the saved file size is almost 300 MB.


Here is the Task Manager with this file loaded into MoI, and ram is still needed to export out polys.

Hi Dan, the surfaces look pretty smooth there - are you running with the default display mesh density?

By default MoI makes pretty dense display meshes, it can help reduce memory consumption by quite a bit to turn those down and make a rougher display mesh. It can also help to avoid bogging down the display as well since there's less data being shoved over to the video card.

To turn down the density, go to Options > View > Meshing parameters, and set "Mesh angle" to 30 degrees and uncheck "Add detail to inflections".

Then shut down MoI and try loading your heavy torus file into a new instance, does that reduce your memory consumption?

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I usually run the display mesh at 6-12 deg. With a setting of 30 deg. it dropped my mem. usage to about 1 GB.

Thanks!

Is the add detail to inflections option basically AA?

> I usually run the display mesh at 6-12 deg. With a setting of 30 deg.
> it dropped my mem. usage to about 1 GB.
>
> Thanks!

You're welcome - yes with heavier models it really helps reduce memory use.


> Is the add detail to inflections option basically AA?

Not quite exactly - when it is enabled it forces additional refinement of the display mesh to put more finely diced triangles in places that have inflections, like in the middle of an "S" type shape where curvature is switching from one side to the other. Those areas tend to be prone to having display artifacts where the shading can look bad if there are not many polygons there. But when you have a heavy model it's better to just not worry about display artifacts and instead have speed and reduced memory footprint to have more priority.


- Michael

Hallo Michael,
my MAC Pro 12-core runs out of memory if I try to export a 130 MB .step file into an .obj file (ca. 1.000.000 polys).
Can I change some settings in MOI to solve this problem?

Thanks for your answer
moritz

Hi Moritz,

> my MAC Pro 12-core runs out of memory if I try to export a 130 MB .step file into an
> .obj file (ca. 1.000.000 polys).
> Can I change some settings in MOI to solve this problem?

Check out here for some things you can do:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5322.2

There are some settings you can adjust to reduce memory load and also if you export the file in a couple of pieces rather than all at once that can help a lot too.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Thank you - your advice to turn down the display thread limit also helped fix the display refresh problems I was having with MoI3D v3 on a Lenovo Thinkpad T410 with "Intel HD Graphics" and Win7 64 bit.

I was experiencing very slow refresh and complete white-out blanking in either single or multi-view display windows - i.e. all or most drawn entities were disappearing, including the background grid - after zooming, selecting a drawn entity or deselecting all by clicking on a blank area of the display.

MoI3D display performance on my T410 now appears to be as good as my desktop PC by using:
"DisplayThreadLimit=1"

As it now works fine, I see little point in experimenting further, but I'm kind of curious to know what advantages if any, might be seen from using: 1 < DisplayThreadLimit < 'moi.ini (default) unknown number causing my reported symptoms'?

Hi hairykiwi,

> As it now works fine, I see little point in experimenting further, but I'm kind of curious to know
> what advantages if any, might be seen from using: 1 < DisplayThreadLimit < 'moi.ini (default)> unknown number causing my reported symptoms'?

The default in v3 is to use multiple threads to work on filling buffers that are then sent to the graphics card.

The reason behind the multiple thread use is to get more use out of multiple CPU cores during a screen draw operation, speeding up the display on heavier models.

But certain drivers seem to be sensitive to it.

- Michael

Thanks Michael.
Cheers,
hairykiwi