GPU & Memory

Vertexix does much of its heavy work on the graphics card — painting, layer compositing, sculpting and picking the surface under the cursor. When a graphics driver misbehaves, or a large model runs into memory limits, these are the switches that help.

Painting looks wrong or slow

Turn off GPU painting on the Interface tab of Settings. Strokes then rasterize on the CPU instead; it takes effect at the next stroke. Anything the GPU path does not cover paints on the CPU automatically either way, and the status bar says so. To start with GPU painting already off, use the --no-gpu-paint command-line option. See GPU-Accelerated Painting.

Sculpting misbehaves

Start Vertexix with --cpu-sculpt to sculpt on the CPU instead of the graphics card. Dynamic topology always sculpts on the CPU.

Automatic fallbacks

Where a GPU feature cannot start, Vertexix falls back to the CPU rather than stopping. Picking the surface under the cursor, for example, drops back to the CPU and writes a line to the log saying so. If something feels slow after a driver update, turn on logging and look for lines like that.

Running out of memory

The heavy operations check memory before they start and refuse, with a message naming what would fit, rather than running out halfway. The ceilings they check against are in Memory Settings, including the GPU memory budget: how much graphics memory painting and layer compositing may keep on the card. Automatic uses half of the graphics card's free memory.

When memory is tight:

• Bake at a lower resolution, or with less supersampling.
• In Sculpt, choose a lower detail level when you Rebuild — the estimate is shown before you commit.
• In Voxel mode, use a larger voxel size: halving the voxel size multiplies the work by eight.
• Close other programs that use the graphics card.

All command-line options are listed in the Command-Line Options appendix.