Why does fur / hair makes the system slow - is it a video card issue ?

[a.quaihoi]

Turning on fur / hair makes my pc super slow is it a video card issue ? Eg. the faster + more memory a video card has, the better Fur / Hair will render in realtime modelling ?   

[robcat2075]

No, a bigger video card won't help much for particle hair. It's mostly a CPU task.

At least, when I went from CPU graphics to a real graphics card I didn't notice a change in such things.

I suggest turning the Hair System's Realtime>Density down to as low as you can stand for styling purposes... and turn hair OFF for most modeling and animation tasks.

(For any material change, do a Save on your PRJ to force the change to be recognized by its various uses in the Project.)

 

On some computers, the real time appearance and speed MAY change depending on the Tool>Options>Global>Real-Time Driver setting. Try both to see if either is preferable.

 

Like-wise, a Windows Compatibility Mode setting MAY improve some aspects of A:M performance.

 

Those settings probably won't change anything but it's easy to try them.

[robcat2075]

Quote

Why does fur / hair makes the system slow?

Short answer, every hair is like three or more CPs whose position needs to be recalculated on every frame, with motion and collisions and stiffness and weight, etc taken into account.  A head of hair will easily be more points to track than most character models typically have.

[a.quaihoi]

Ahh that makes sense, Thanks Robert, I will give it a go, really wish this could be shifted off to GPU instead of CPU for processing in realtime though, all this GPU power going to waste !!!