What's New in Performance in Autodesk Maya 2016 Extension 2

Improved Viewport performance with MultiDraw consolidation

MultiDraw Consolidation is now active by default in OpenGL mode in Viewport 2. It increases viewport performance by combining traditional consolidation for static objects and MultiDraw consolidation for non-deforming animated objects (including meshes, NURBS surfaces, NURBS curves, and other geometry) when drawing in the viewport. For more information see General variables.

MultiDraw provides performance gains particularly in scenes that have large numbers of non-deforming objects. Non-animated scenes are unaffected.

Note: MultiDraw Consolidation is supported on most recent, supported, Linux and Windows GPU hardware and drivers. See the Maya Hardware Certification chart for more information.

Due to missing graphics stack support on Mac OS X, MultiDraw Consolidation is not available.

Transparency Performance Gains

Both traditional static and MultiDraw consolidation now offer increased support for transparent objects when you use an out-of-order transparency mode. This is useful for scenes where there are many (1000+) transparent objects.

To see performance gains, switch the Transparency Algorithm in the Viewport 2.0 options from the default Object Sorting to Weighted Average or Depth Peeling. (Results vary in scenes depending on the amount of transparent objects in the scene.)

Viewport 2.0 performance improvements

• Control the preview quality of UV tile textures in the UV Editor to avoid waiting for textures to load with full resolution.

  The Preview Quality setting in the file node Attribute Editor now applies to both the UV Editor and Viewport 2.0.

• Materials are not evaluated when they are not visualized in the viewport. You can therefore improve performance by setting objects to wireframe or by hiding them.
• Playback performance is improved by a factor of 2-3 in scenes with hidden objects.
• Screen space ambient occlusion performance is improved when using OpenGL Core Profile mode

• Interaction is improved while materials and textures load when opening a new scene with the Material Loading Mode set to Parallel in the Display preferences.

  The Materials To Load HUD and Textures To Load HUD indicate the loading progress. When complete, the HUD shows 0.

• Memory allocated to textures not used for rendering can be released with the ogs command and drt flag. For example, use this command to free texture memory after switching from textured to shaded mode, or templating or hiding objects. See Release GPU memory for unused textures.