I'm seeing extreme lag in what appear to be interface redraw operations. For example, when I move an object around in 3D view, performance is great, but if I right-click to cancel the operation, it takes ~5 seconds for the object to appear back at its original location. I see similar delays in switching between views, i.e. from 3D view to preferences, in opening menus, etc. Menus often flicker away, and tooltips usually fail to appear, so this appears to be a buffer swap issue.
I came across the following post regarding Intel graphics cards:
http://code.blender.org/index.php/2011/03/intel-graphics-card-testing-needed/
As suggested, I tried triple-buffering, overlap, etc., but unfortunately the problem remains. Do I need to restart Blender, or do anything else for those settings to take effect?
This only occurs on my laptop - Core i7 4GB RAM Win7 32-bit Intel HD 4500 - on other machines Blender runs just fine. Graphics drivers are up-to-date. This occurs with both 2.5.7 and 2.5.7b. Blender pre-2.5, and earlier 2.5 builds (sorry, don't remember which) worked fine on this machine.
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Hi,
Switching Blender swap methods is effective immediate, no restart is needed.
Out of all our intel-gfx reports this is a unique one though... there's something seriously failing in opengl on that system. Did you check if the laptop (seems to be a new one) has opengl settings and/or driver settings you can play with? For changes there, you do need to restart blender each time.
(move to opengl issue tracker)
The Intel drivers used to have a dedicated OpenGL settings page, but it looks like the recent ones have disabled it in favor of a dumbed-down interface that only shows vsync and a couple of other options. I'm trying to locate some sort of advanced interface that lets me access the full settings. If there's anything you'd like me to try in the meantime, just let me know.
Thanks for all your hard work; I've been using Blender since 1.6, and I still love it! :)
So far it looks like Intel removed the ability to change those settings. I have installed GLView, which allows me to at least view settings, and it confirms that the driver does support OpenGL 2.1.
I'm developing Blender on an old system with opengl 1.4 even.
Maybe it's glsl or textured shading you use?
No, I actually haven't even tried loading anything yet; this behavior is just with the default cube scene, and default Blender settings, i.e. no VBOs or anything fancy.
I realized that Intel just released new drivers this past Friday. So I updated to those, and performance is actually slightly better; not sure if that is just a coincidence or a side-effect of rebooting to install the drivers. But it still takes ~3-4 seconds to redraw the screen after I cancel moving an object around, and I still have the same issues with menus flickering and tooltips failing to appear.
If menus draw badly, it is definitely related to buffer swap method used here... maybe carefully check all 4 options in blender preferences again?
I started Blender fresh and tried all the options - Full, Overlap Flip, Overlap, Triple-buffer, Automatic - again, but I still see the same behavior with each.
I did some more Google research and came up with this:
http://landwehr.dk/blog/2008/03/blender_on_mac_minimacbook_wit.html
It describes to problems on Mac Mini / Macbooks, but due to Intel graphics cards, so maybe it's relevant?