Will more RAM help speed up blender's viewport? If not, what will?

Hey guys! I’ve been using blender for a long time now, rigging, modeling, and making plenty of 3d renders! Although, I came across a problem that I noticed when I began animating… My scenes are to big! Whenever I have a large scene in my viewport I get massive FPS drops, which is unbearable to work with! Ggladly, I am currently working on a computer build for gaming, music production, and of course 3D art in Blender. Here is my future build’s components…

CPU: AMD FX-6300 3.5GHz 6-Core Processor
GPU: Asus GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Video Card
RAM:G.Skill Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory

There are my main important components, but I still don’t know which ones would actually increase the speed of blender’s viewport. I would expect the graphics card to give my a stable workable FPS, but I’m not sure. So, is buying extra RAM such as 16 or 32 GB a good investment? Or should I put my money toward a beefy graphics card or CPU?

-Thanks, yupol.

Hey guys! I’ve been using blender for a long time now, rigging, modeling, and making plenty of 3d renders! Although, I came across a problem that I noticed when I began animating… My scenes are to big! Whenever I have a large scene in my viewport I get massive FPS drops, which is unbearable to work with! Gladly, I am currently working on a computer build for gaming, music production, and of course 3D art in Blender. Here is my future build’s components…

CPU: AMD FX-6300 3.5GHz 6-Core Processor
GPU: Asus GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Video Card
RAM:G.Skill Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory

There are my main important components, but I still don’t know which ones would actually increase the speed of blender’s viewport. I would expect the graphics card to give my a stable workable FPS, but I’m not sure. So, is buying extra RAM such as 16 or 32 GB a good investment? Or should I put my money toward a beefy graphics card or CPU?

-Thanks, yupol.

I just went through building a rig for Blender, so I understand where you’re coming from. I had lots of questions, especially about graphics cards.

It would take a really beefy rig to get close to real time FPS in your viewport. There are other considerations as well, such as playing back in wireframe, solid, textured, how many objects, etc… Therefore, in doing your test renders it’s still going to be best to use Render > OpenGL Render Animation and playing back from cache or saved file. Here’s a helpful note, or at least it was for me when I was learning to test animations in Blender. Under Scene (camera icon) go down to Stamp and turn it on and set what you need, such as Frame. This helps you relate the OpenGL render back to your scene file frames for tweaking. Make sure to turn off in final render. :wink:

Graphics card is important for render and OpenGL in viewport especially using Cycles. Make sure you get a card that supports it or your going to have a nice card for games, but not usuable for Blender. I have an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4gig. Whichever, card you get make sure it works with Blender OpenGL.

Check your ram usage in task manager… more than likely ram will not improve performance that much.

More then likely, upgrading your graphics card will give the biggest FPS improvement with the blender viewport, alternatively setting up your scene with a nice layer management system allowing you to isolate and work on different sections may be the most efficient speed up of them all.

RAM will not increase speed at all, unless you’re completely running out of it, at which point your entire system will become very slow because it needs to page data out to your harddisk/SSD.

Regarding your build: Don’t get an AMD CPU. Even if those six cores were “real” cores (which they’re not, since every two of them share an FPU) - a lot of Blender’s functionality is limited by single-core performance. Instead, get an Intel dual-core CPU at a high clock, if you don’t want to go for a Quadcore.

As for your problems, the “solution” is to not have heavy scenes. I’ve used Blender through several generations of hardware and the situation with heavy scenes hasn’t really improved much. Getting a faster computer is ultimately not going to fix the inefficiencies that Blender has, both from a GPU and CPU perspective. Some of that might be fixed eventually, some may not.

New depsgraph and viewport stuff should help with a good chunk of large scene slowdown. But until then, all of the hardware in the world won’t make it “good”. What most people don’t tell you, though, is that most 3D packages suffer from the same exact problems (albeit perhaps to a lesser degree). Certain packages like Katana and ClariseFX have sprung up just to fill this niche. It’s still very much a work in progress in R&D to find the best way to handle massive data sets.

I can only speculate for those other packages where I can’t see the code, but the real problem is basically Human Resources. We’re talking about datasets that are far from ‘massive’. There’s stuff in certain codebases that is basically algorithmically broken, but messing around with it is akin to the endgame of Jenga and fixing it is akin to rebuilding the foundation of a highrise. I’m not optimistic about this.

Moderation: I’ve merged your two threads into the one in “Support > Technical Support”. Please do not cross-post across subforums.

Thank you everyone for your help! I will continue to tweak my build for the best Blender performance possible, as well as for gaming! I thank you all for your help and support! ��