Here's an interesting trick to speed up viewport drawing.
Michael Lackner writes:
Hello everyone. I recently discovered a little setting in the User Preferences and it's just awesome. Blenders viewport is much faster and I had up to 20 million vertices. Blender still worked fine! So if you wanna make Blender faster check out the video!
8 Comments
To save you a click, it's VBOs.
More tips: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?257323-What-everybody-needs-to-know-about-Blender-Viewport-performance
And an add-on: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/3D_interaction/Display_Tools
THANK YOUUUUUUU!!!!
Why in the Netherlands is this disabled by default!
It appears that it at least used to be a bit buggy in some cases.
See
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2014-January/042660.html
and
https://developer.blender.org/T37518#185843
I had problems with this a while ago, no objects would draw at all when it was enabled.
Seems better now though :)
This didn't work for me. A group of objects with a total of 1.7 million vertices is just as slow with or without VBOs checked.
This is on an i7 2600k system, 16gb RAM, nVidia GTX560 Ti graphics card.
I'm guessing there must be other settings that work in conjunction with VBOs to get this speed boost.
I believe this speedup is limited to single large objects, rather than large groups of smaller objects.
Read the link in first comment (by greg zaal).
Subsurf must have an other modifier under itself in the stack. If subsurf is the last or the only one in the stack, VBOs is not used in object mode.
Thanks, elvios and Sterling Roth. That solves the mystery. ;)