Found in Blender 2.58a on winXP/Ubuntu 10.04 using a Geforce 6800GT
If I have a Smoke Domain in my scene, the 3D viewport performance penalty is quite heavy, especially if I am modelling an object inside of the domain. In one case with continuous grab active, the gui locked up completely and the whole ubuntu desktop became unusable.
1) rotate the view around the standard cube - direct & fast viewport feedback
2) make it a smoke domain object
3) rotate the view again - much slower (although there is "nothing" there)
If you don't notice much of an effect zoom in close so the cube fills the viewport / inside of the domain.
Tested alternative window draw methods without success.
Temporary solution: move the domain to another layer or model in local view
Description
Event Timeline
Do you use the nonfree drivers from Nvidia itself? Performance is typically much better.
Further we can't do much, this code is same for every platform we support, and in most cases performance is fine.
You can also check in on irc.freenode.net #blendercoders to find someone to go over it in more detail.
Yes, I'm already using Nvidia Geforce 275.33 on windows and 173.14.22 on Ubuntu.
I was hoping that you could make the domain only initialize on playback / when there actually is visible smoke, but perhaps that's more trouble than it's worth, especially if I am the only one with this issue.
Now that I know why it is slowing down, it's easy to handle. The problem was that there seemed to be no reason why it suddenly became slower until I dissected the scene.