Viewport performance of 2016 vs 14

[Tim Nelson]

Hey guys, long time no post! I was wondering, does Max 2016 offer any viewport performance over 2014, or is it just 2017 that's significantly improved? I'm pretty hesitant to upgrade to 2017 because of all the bad reports. Just not sure if it'd be worth it to upgrade to 2016 or wait for a more stable version of Max to come out.

 

Apart from software, I plan on upgrading from my GTX 970 to the 1080 soon so I'm hoping that will help a lot too.

[Justin Hunt]

2016 viewport performance is good, better in many ways than 2017 which is quirky to say the least. If you are waiting for a more stable release, you'll be waiting a very long time

[Josef Wienerroither]

2016 viewport performance is good, better in many ways than 2017 which is quirky to say the least. If you are waiting for a more stable release, you'll be waiting a very long time

 

Max 2017 is excellent for me - very noticable imprvement over Max 2016 ( which already was very fast compared to 2014 )

Don't forget that 2017 has improved meshing pipline internally, which improves overall speed a lot.

But there seem to be some issues when using 2017 on Win10 and or on newer Geforces ( 980/1070/1080 ).

But for me 2017 is a blast ! ( Win7, 780GTX )

[James Vella]

I agree with the above but Ill break down my experience for you

 

2014 is much faster at creating objects from scratch (like a box), and generally loading 3dsmax... but thats about where it ends (just like any older max version you load really - they seem ultra fast to load up and do general tasks. But 2017s viewport can handle far more data generally speaking without too much slow down.

 

2016 for me is far more stable than 2017 - less crashing and less strange things that happen - but in my opinion its just an accumulation of 3dsmax problems carrying over from 1 version to the next. I noticed this since they removed reactor years ago to be honest.

 

I would recommend staying with 2016 for a few reasons;

1. Backburner works (yay!). 2017 I still have to restart twice per day - absolute production killer.

2. Bertrand's recent post about licensing and costs for a 1 man band are intruiging

3. Every odd release has had strange issues for me (2013, 2015, 2017) - just generally have not had a good experience with them

 

Only reason as a 1 man band I would upgrade to 2016 would be - plugin support and generally more speed. Eg. CG-Source latest multitexture plugin only supports 2015 and up. So I guess soon you will have less options for 3rd party support if you stay with 2014.

 

my 2 cents

 

edit: 1 additonal thing that really bugs me in 2017 is ... if you have 2 max scenes open and one is saving, loading, autosaving or crashing - the other max scene will be completely frozen until the first one responds... this is probably my biggest workflow killer

Edited March 10, 2017 by redvella