I just got an 8800GT card, and Motionbuilder hates it, mediocre/poor frame rates in “models only” and seriously takes a dive if you show any skeletons/markers etc., down to 5 fps or worse. These are heavy constraint scenes, but my 7800GTX never dips below 50 fps in the same scenes.

Anyone else seen this, have any “settings” workarounds for a cure? There is only one driver for the card I can find, 169.02.

I have Deja Vu, we had similar problems (and a discussion thread) with 7950 cards, and Motionbuilder just hated the cards/drivers the same way. I had to go back to my 7800GTX and the 78.01 drivers, which still work great to date (MB hates any newer drivers with that card), fast as crap frame rates overall.

Very frustrating. Is anyone having “excellent” performance with an 8xxx series card? Which one? I’m ready to go back to the 7800GTX again. :)

Thanks in advance,
Cris

I bought myself a 8800 GT card and have no problems whatsoever with Motionbuilder ( but with Maya).
Before that I had a 7950 GT and also had no Problems. Maybe there are properties in the Graphic options you need to change (in the expert section). There you can decide which functions the card does for which program.

gnassbasti 12 December 2007 09:01 AM

I bought myself a 8800 GT card and have no problems whatsoever with Motionbuilder ( but with Maya).
Before that I had a 7950 GT and also had no Problems. Maybe there are properties in the Graphic options you need to change (in the expert section). There you can decide which functions the card does for which program.

Thanks for the input. Maya problems, eh? What kind? Not boding well for Mr. 8800…

Yes, I’ve messed around with the settings in there, but no successful combination. Glad you have had success. Mind you, I tried some “light” scenes and the frame rates were over 100fps (so it said), but showing skeletons/rigs etc. still slowed it by almost 20 fps, making the result still very fast by most standards. But the heavy scenes I’m dealing with really show the hurt; a “good” card should be at 50 or 60fps, and I’m getting a dismal 24 fps which drops to 5 fps with rigs showing. Hard to quantify “bad frame rate” without a benchmark scene file per say. Maybe I can come up with one…

What OS are you running? I’m on XP 32 at the moment, that may make a difference as well.

Cris

Jup, Maya does strange things, such as the perspective view going black and blank, i can’t rotate, the high quality render view hangs up etc. I had these Problems with the 7950 GT at the beginning too, but at one point when I updated the driver, they stopped and it worked all right. Maybe it is a matter of the driver. I am also working with XP 32.

I’m having framerate problems with MB 7.5 and I have a 7950 GT graphics card.  My framerate problems happen whenever I plot any animations to a control rig on a character.  Any of you guys have the same or had the same issue?

clockwerkz 13 December 2007 07:15 PM

I’m having framerate problems with MB 7.5 and I have a 7950 GT graphics card.  My framerate problems happen whenever I plot any animations to a control rig on a character.  Any of you guys have the same or had the same issue?

Yes (as stated in my original post). I had an original 7950GT, and showing the control rig/x-ray mode/etc. would destroy already crappy frame rates. Many other folks had the same problem. I can’t comment on newer drivers helping, I went back to a 7800GTX which still performs excellent to this day.

8800GT appears to have the same issues. 8800GTS however works great/correctly. We just tested both with all available drivers, the GT is a non-starter, the GTS works perfectly. This is on both XP32 and Vista32.

Since these are not “supported” cards, it is a coin toss at best if new drivers will remedy the GT’s problems.

Cris

crispin 12 December 2007 05:45 AM

I just got an 8800GT card, and Motionbuilder hates it, mediocre/poor frame rates in “models only” and seriously takes a dive if you show any skeletons/markers etc., down to 5 fps or worse. These are heavy constraint scenes, but my 7800GTX never dips below 50 fps in the same scenes.

Anyone else seen this, have any “settings” workarounds for a cure? There is only one driver for the card I can find, 169.02.

I have Deja Vu, we had similar problems (and a discussion thread) with 7950 cards, and Motionbuilder just hated the cards/drivers the same way. I had to go back to my 7800GTX and the 78.01 drivers, which still work great to date (MB hates any newer drivers with that card), fast as crap frame rates overall.

Very frustrating. Is anyone having “excellent” performance with an 8xxx series card? Which one? I’m ready to go back to the 7800GTX again. :)

Thanks in advance,
Cris

Try this: http://www.cgfilmmaking.com/storydetails.php?id=100195

Thanks markdc,

I will give those tweaks a shot.

I did find out the main root of all my ills though, running in “dual view” mode.

Even setting 3D to “single display performance” made no difference, until I set the monitors to “Span” instead. (I realized running one monitor worked fine, Brad suggested I run two in Span) I’ve always run in “Dual View” mode for years, never occurred to me to try “Span”, or to mention it as a variable in my posts!

Well holy cow, the 8800GT is a great performer now. Backdrop video playing with stereo 44.1 audio, models only, a few dozen relations/constraints, realtime 7x antialiasing on - 55 to 60fps. Turn off AA and everything pegs at 60 fps (the refresh rate), even showing rigs etc.

The biggest plus is that all the intermittent stutter/out-of-sync audio problems disappeared, rock solid now!

So, I’d rather run in"dual view”, but “span” improves/solves some serious issues, so “span” it is. Wish I tried it sooner. Maybe those specific tweaks will make “dual view” usable…

Cris

Give it a try. I use dual-view (I hate span).

Hmm i’m also experiencing this problem. I just started a new job and my workstation has a gf 8800 gtx. I tried the span mode and the single monitor mode and everything still got very laggy as soon as i load a character.

I know a friend of mine also has the same problem with a gf 8800 gtx has anyone come up with a solution yet?

/Mikael Hansson

Mikael Hansson
Lead Animator
Fatshark AB

“Games are like sausages, the end result may be tasty but you don’t want to know what goes into them.”

This solution fixes the frame rate issue with a dual monitor setup with a 8800GTX. Thanks to MarkDC.

Go to the nVidia control panel - 3D Settings.
Create a custom setting for motionbuilder (for std the actual exe is std.exe)
Turn off Threaded Optimization
Set texture filtering - quality to Performance
Vert sync off
Multipsdisplay gpu accel to Single display performance

I went from 5 fps to 60 fps (with mia walking and selective redraw on)

This is with the nVida 8800 GTX

After applying this, we did got some refresh display problem (Character Ctrl view not refreshing) in nVidia Dualview mode but not in Horizontal Span mode (which is not as nice the Dualview mode as many find)

However, this problem went away after restarting MB a second time(!).