GUI suddenly incredibly slow when adding smoke

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1

Hi,

Blender used to work fine on my system. Smoke simulations where not fast but ok. Until today. Now, suddenly whenever I add a smoke simulation without doing anything else (rendering, playing the animation, etc.) the GUI becomes incredibly slow to the extend that it takes a couple of seconds to e.g. select the camera. Zooming, etc. takes ages. Please notice this is the point where no smoke is being drawn on the screen yet. This would happen when I play the animation. Trying to do this results in one frame every couple of seconds.

I can recronstruct the issue easily: I open blender and the standard scene gets loaded. I press space, type ‘quick smoke’ and enter. From here on the GUI is unusable. One of my CPUs is then running on 100% and the rest is bored. I am not sure whether the smoke simulation was single threaded before as well!? Should it be?

I doubt that is is an issue with my system since I did not change anything since yesterday when everything ran fine. Also, I do not encounter any issues in other software. So I doubt there is a hardware issue.

I already loaded factory settings. I deleted the whole .config/blender folder, downloaded blender again. I tried the official 2.72b build as well as today’s blender-2.72-d35d9e6-linux-glibc211-x86_64 from buildbot.

My system:
Mint Linux 17; NVIDIA proprietary driver 331.38; complete system up to date

I am running out of options how to pin point the issue. Can anybody help here? Thank you!

2

Domain divisions and Smoke High Resolution can kill PC easily. Have defaults? 32 and unchecked?
I feel smoke sim uses treads and all available cores - i have them at almost 100%.

3

Hi,

Thanks for the help. I found the solution. It had nothing to do with blender internal settings but rather with stupid me.
The link I created to start blender in Linux pointed to the blender-softwaregl script and not to the blender binary, therefore disabling hardware openGL rendering (as I understand). Starting it with the blender binary works fine.

It’s beyond me why running blender with software openGL rendering worked fine until yesterday and what the smoke simulation contributes to the issue - since the GUI had nothing serious to do. However, issues are gone now.

Thanks!

4

[deleted: double posting]