Maya viewport keeps freezing up
You might be wondering, how could Maya be freezing up with one simple cube in the scene, what could it possibly be choking on? I spend all this money on a quadro gpu and the most complex scene I can handle is a dam cube!
The solution is quite simple but incredibly frustrating to debug when you don’t know where to start. The culprit is all in the name of power optimization settings. The machine you are using likely came with integrated graphics (super slow) and an external graphics card GPU (that’s the power house). Now the reason Maya keeps choking and freezing (what seems to only happen for a few seconds but eventually becomes smooth) is your machine trying to first use the integrated graphics then realize it’s too slow and switches to the GPU, this switch is unfortunately not fast enough and creates a frustrating user experience.
Solution
Step 1) Install the latest drivers for your graphics card
Make sure you are running on the latest graphics card driver.
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx
Step 2) Change the settings for your application
- Right click on the desktop and select “NVIDIA Control Panel”
- Click on ‘3D Settings > Manage 3D Settings’ on the left menu
- Click on ‘Program Settings’ on the right section.
- Select Autodesk Maya from the dropdown.
- Select High Performance NVIDIA processor for the preferred graphics processor.
- Press Apply
Bonus
As an added bonus to make sure your graphics card is always used you should disable NVIDIA Optimus from your bios. However if you are on a laptop you will consume your battery charge much faster as the integrated graphics will now always come last.
Conclusion
You’ve now instructed the graphics driver to always use your GPU as opposed to the integrated graphics when using Maya. Now you won’t have to endure the freeze lag when the driver is trying to figure out which is the best to use when you already know the answer.
