In 3ds Max 2017, there are a lot of performance improvements in may area.
I think It is the fastest 3ds Max ever.
- Viewport is faster than ever in many cases. Selecting and manipulating sub-object is also a lot faster.
- UV Editor is totally rebuilt with DirectX which is a lot faster and can handle bigger mesh.
- TrackView also perform better and stable.
- Now you can use alembic performance mode for any object and have an option for force cache.
- Many unnecessary evaluation problem is fixed. For example, if object is hidden/frozen/display as box, the applied material would not be evaluated.
Here is some benchmarks numbers to show how much 3ds Max is faster than the previous versions.
| 2012 | 2014 | 2016 | 2017 | |
| Deforming Mesh | 6.9 | 32.0 | 45.4 | 95.3 |
| HiRes Transform Anim | 25.0 | 17.9 | 20.0 | 27.7 |
| Static Many Object | 3.8 | 3.9 | 3.7 | 14.8 |
| Production Scene | 1.0 | 3.1 | 3.2 | 5.1 |
All numbers are fps. The fps number is measured by script. It is not from viewport statistics.
Deforming Mesh
This scene has 4 point cached characters.
4objs / 142k verts / 283k Faces.
Thanks to the brand new GPU mesh builder in 2017, 2017 is 1,300% faster than 2012.
HiRes Transform Animation
This scene has an animated hires rigged rigid mesh robot.
800 obj / 9.1mil verts / 18mil faces.
Many Static Objects
I made a 10+ buildings with Building Generator script. It has more than 20,000 low-res statics objects.
20,000 obj / 2.2mil verts / 3.2mil faces
You can see 400% performance improvement
Production Scene
One of sample scene file from Blur which is included in Brandon Young’s DVD.
Four point cached hires character and baked transforms.
106 obj / 407k verts / 791k faces
You can see 500% performance improvement compare to 2012.