Flakey behavior can be the result of using a gaming graphics card like a GeForce instead a workstation graphics card like a Quadro.
Gaming cards cut many corners to get their speed up, cost down, do one thing very well, and mediocre at everything else. Games tax a few specific resources pretty hard, but the number of different resources they tax is fairly thin. Workstations cards, on the other hand, are designed for a wider array of uses providing more depth with extra buffers, overlay planes, and so forth because their purpose is to be reliable in most any situation. Many applications lean on these extra buffers to work properly. If you are using a gaming card, you may run into situations where the application either takes a performance hit, or makes bad decisions because the buffer does not exist. When I was at Carbine, we had a mix of graphics cards. My workstation had a midrange Quadro while the artists had top end GeForces. There were many issues where they would run into flakiness that my workstation could not reproduce. For example, if multiple windows occupied the same screen space, applications would get confused which one had focus. If you were using photoshop and clicked on a particular part of the screen to paint, the application would think you were using the explorer window in XSI because the explorer window was in the same 2D screen space, but on a different layer. Likewise, if you were in XSI and did something in a viewport, the application would think you were working in your email client if it was open in the same screen location. Quadros did not have this problem. In another example, an artist needed to do video capture to demonstrate a modeling technique, but each time he did his capture session, the application would only capture the active viewport in XSI, not the entire screen. If the schematic view had focus, then only the schematic view would be captured while everything else was black because XSI's interface was comprised of multiple windows embedded into a framework, and each window was on a different overlay plane. Gaming cards typically only have support for a few overlay planes (if that). Again, the Quadro did not have this issue - it supported multiple overlay planes to capture all the windows in the XSI interface. Matt Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2018 11:19:06 +0100 (CET) From: Morten Bartholdy <[email protected]> Subject: OTish - todays Maya rant and Q - selecting items To: "Userlist, Softimage" <[email protected]> Am I the only one being seriously annoyed by the seeming inaccuracy of selection of items in Maya viewports? I click directly on geometry with plenty of screenspace around, and Maya selects an adjacent object. Orbit a bit and dolly in, try again - Maya selects another irrelevant adjacent object. Click elsewhere on object I want to select, and finally I get to select it. WTF were they thinking? I find myself selecting adjacent objects and rig elements, making quick selection sets (so I can quickly find and unhide them again) and hiding them, just to select one particular object. Needless to say it is a massive waste of time. Is there a reason behind this madness or is is something like depth sorting inaccuracy or what?? Morten ------ Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to [email protected] with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
