Fractal Terrains 3 - bogging on high end computer?

iamthecrave

Hello all. First post so please be gentle!

I just purchased FT3 and was surprised at how slowly it runs on my machine. Screen updates for every change take 5 - 10 seconds. This is mostly surprising because my system is:
Ryzen 9 with 12 cores, nVidia 2080 Super, 64 MB of Ram, and the software is running on an SDD. So, perhaps I'm doing something wrong?

Is there a way I can get the software to take advantage of the graphical hardware?

Any tips y'all have would be most appreciated.

jslayton

I'm going to guess that you have at least a 4K screen and are running FT3 fullscreen. FT3 is a multithreaded software renderer and the biggest impact on its performance is usually the number of pixels that it draws. You should be able to get it running faster by using a smaller area of your display. I understand that the suggestion isn't what you were hoping for.
You can also try turning on "Coarse Initial Drawing Pass" using Edit>>Preferences. It won't make things run any faster, but you'll get a first rendering pass that fills all of the pixels in your window.

Loopysue

There are also certain fractal functions that take far longer to render than others. I presume this is due to the sheer number of calculations that the more complicated ones require. The worst fractal I've found is the Voronoi Ridged Multifractal. It takes about 27 seconds to resolve itself on my machine, and though it's not as big as yours it's also pretty good and only about a year old.

You could try a different fractal perhaps? You pick them from the dropdown box at the top of the Fractal Function tab in the World Settings dialog.