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I'm somewhat new to Blender, and lately I've been trying the new Multires for sculpting high detail poly models. From what I had seen online I was under the impression you would be able to reach very high poly counts, and that the VRAM statistic could be a good indicator to how much your machine can handle.

I have an RTX 2060 Super 8Gb, i5-8400 2.80GHz and 16Gb of ram. The current model I was working is the retopology version of a previous sculpt. I tried going to a subdivision level of 5 on multires, totalling around 42M triangles, but switch back and forth levels depending on the scale of the work. Blender claims it's only using less than 3/8GB of VRAM. Still, there are a lot of stuttering, slowdown and some operations just freeze the pc entirely, requiring a manual reset.

So my questions are:

  • Is the VRAM statistic a sufficient mesurement of scene performance?
  • Are hidden or deactivated collections on the file still using
    processing power?
  • Is there any way to stop Blender from freezing the PC under high demand?
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  • $\begingroup$ Have you checked it's not maxing out the CPU or RAM? In my experience System memory use increases exponentially faster than Video memory, EX: i.gyazo.com/34e8e768e5e791a007967041b7c04ab1.png $\endgroup$ – Joeyflodder Sep 23 '20 at 11:08
  • $\begingroup$ I ran an OCCT test while on Blender ( i.imgur.com/a3M3Sse.png ) CPU and GPU were fine, but just going into edit mode and selecting a few loops will spike the memory use. But even after leaving edit mode it stayed at 12gb of use. Is this normal? As the test show, I was only using ~15% of my VRAM at the time. Shouldn't that play a bigger role? Is there any way to lower this memory use within Blender? It easily went over my 16b as I played around more on edit mode, which explais the issues, but seems odd to me. $\endgroup$ – omiyage Sep 23 '20 at 11:34
  • $\begingroup$ How much memory does it say it's using in blender itself on the status bar (bar at the bottom)? If it doesn't show it, right-click the bar to enable it. As for edit mode performance, when you go into edit mode on a high poly mesh the system memory usage can spike to 2-3 times the object mode use while VRAM use doesn't increase notably. The system memory use should go back down when leaving edit mode. $\endgroup$ – Joeyflodder Sep 23 '20 at 11:48
  • $\begingroup$ It went to about 7-8Gb. The problem is that it didn't clear after leaving edit mode. Even after waiting 5mins. I tried for instance to select and hide some features on edit before sculpting and end up at more than 12 Gb of ram in use, but saving and reloading the scene cleared the memory back to the standard 3-4Gb and kept the faces hidden. $\endgroup$ – omiyage Sep 23 '20 at 12:13
  • $\begingroup$ I am unsure about why it's not reducing memory use when leaving edit mode. $\endgroup$ – Joeyflodder Sep 23 '20 at 12:22

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