When I load a project in iClone, I can see from the “info” that the textures are loading for the project progressively until it gets to the last 100 or even down to 1 more - and then it takes a long time to finish loading. I have a project that goes through 715 textures and it loads in about 15 seconds up to 714 but then it takes another 20 or 25 seconds to finish to 715. And this is a simple project - more complex ones can take 2-1/2 minutes to load. But it’s the last several textures that seem to take forever.
I thought the issue was my video card, but when they installed a 5700 Ti with 16 gig memory in the shop, the load time was just as long - no improvement. My existing card is a 3800 Ti with 12 gig memory.
Could it be my CPU and installed system RAM? My computer was built 5 years ago.
I gave the same project to Bigboss to load on his system and it loaded in less than 5 seconds.
So what exactly does iClone utilize to load a project with multiple textures.
CPU is doing a “heavy lifting” while project is loading. Not sure why last textures take longer to load though.
I keep Progressive Texture Loading off at all times. But if you turn it on and intend to keep it that way, then it makes sense to move CPU slider to 60%. Otherwise at default 30% it almost twice as slow. And if you’re still waiting for the texture load to complete, then I’d say disable this feature altogether.
So I had Progressive Texture checked with CPU at 30%.
Progressive Texture with CPU at 30% - 35 seconds to load
Progressive Texture with CPU at 60% - 32 seconds to load
Turned off Progressive Texture - 20 seconds to load.
With the first two, the final texture is what takes half the time. With it turned off, the project just shows up after 20 seconds.
The only reason I had it turned on was because 3 or 4 months ago, I was having issues with a lot of crashes and it was suggested to me to turn it on.
So I picked a more complicated project -
Progressive Texture loading off - 25 seconds
Turned on with CPU at 60% - 45 seconds (all but one texture loaded by 20 seconds and it took 30 seconds for the final one)
So if the CPU does the “Heavy Lifting”, then it stands to reason that a new CPU should improve things, right?
Not necessarily. More powerful CPUs often have more cores, however, I have no idea, how many cores iClone can actually use (efficiently). You could try to find out via the task manager what the actual CPU load is when loading these projects at different percentage settings. There are also tools that show CPU usage by core, if you really want to dive into this.
What I am saying is that iClone may benefit more from high clock speeds than from many cores (as a rule of thumb, the higher the core count of the CPU, the lower the clock speed and vice versa).
What CPU do you currently have?
Even if @4u2ges is right and the CPU does the heavy lifting (I wouldn’t know; my iClone projects are relatively small—usually a single character and my iClone machine is old to boot), there is also the question of the type and speed of the drive the project is stored on: upgrading the CPU may reveal another bottleneck. Before you invest in new hardware, I’d do a little more research.
My C drive is a brand new (last month) SSD drive - I placed the project there and the load time may have improved by 2 or 3 seconds. I keep all my content on a brand new D drive which I just replaced also about a month ago as I needed a larger drive. So I think the drive is fairly efficient.
The thing that intrigues me is that Bigboss loaded the project in less than 5 seconds without that lag of the last texture taking a long time. I can see from the Task Manager that the CPU is doing most of the work when loading a project.
My current motherboard is a Gigabyte Z490 Aorus Elite AC LGA 1200 Gen ATX Motherboard. I have Intel Core i7-10700K 8 core 16 thread processor, 3.8 GHZ
I have 32 gig RAM DDR4 3200 MHZ
Now, Bigboss has Intel Core i7-14700K 20 cores, 64 Ram, Z690-E Gaming Motherboard and he loaded in less than 5 seconds with no final texture lagging to load.
Well, the 14700K is 3 years younger than the 10700K and between 1.6 to 3 times as fast (in benchmarks, in real life your mileage may vary); Bigboss also has twice the RAM (possibly faster as well), so overall I would expect his system to perform better (but not 5 or 6 times as fast when loading this project—more research into this phenomenon seems advised).
However, perhaps you can ask him what his RAM usage looks like (in other words, see, if this particular project benefits from having more than 32 GB of RAM available).
Since a new CPU will probably also require a new motherboard (and perhaps RAM), and also keeping a new GPU in mind, you are basically talking about a new system. I would suggest retiring your current system as a back-up/fall-back unit and consider getting a new machine. To me, it makes no sense to put a more powerful (current) CPU together with other hardware that is some 5 years old. Since I don’t know how much you know about hardware, I suggest you may also want to talk to somebody who knows this stuff and won’t sell you something that’s total overkill for your needs either.
I just wanted to give an update - I decided to get new motherboard, new CPU and New ram - much the same as BB. I just used my same case, internal hard drives and SS drive. I was able to keep everything loaded so no re-loading of stuff and only ran into a few licensing issues that got resolved.
The speed increase is quite noticeable. Projects load and render much faster and overall, the computer is performing better. My existing video card seems to be just fine and this turned out to be a better way to go for my particular work flow.
I appreciate all the input and advice - by testing out through task manager performance I did discover before upgrading that both iray and omniverse are using a lot of CPU power, as well as the video card and it’s made a huge difference.
Personally, I usually change the entire system (i.e. delegate the previous system to some other lower-performance or back-up task) because while I appreciate not having to re-install all the software/downloaded content, I think that electronic components age (physically, not just no longer being the latest and greatest), and thus it makes little sense to me to combine a new motherboard and CPU with other components such as drives, PSU, GPU that may already be 6 or 7 years old for another 5+ years usage. Also, I don’t have the technical skills to do more to a PC than add a PCIe card—changing a motherboard and CPU would be beyond me.