HQV reference model bug

General questions and troubleshooting SOFTIMAGE©
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Bullit
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Joined: 24 May 2012, 09:44

HQV reference model bug

Post by Bullit » 16 Apr 2014, 13:43

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic ... YY4bXyg860
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 15, 2014

SOFTIMAGE QUALITYBLEED VULNERABILITY
Discovered by Security Researchers Gibli, Barosin, Pancres, Friedman, Akita, Jones, Panisset, Barbieri and Piparo

Psyop experienced a "Eureka" moment today, when an artist discovered that updating referenced models was nearly two orders of magnitude faster when done through RDP (remote desktop protocol) rather than on a local workstation.

Simultaneously, a different artist in LA encountered issues with slowness saving files in Softimage, and a quick test confirmed that saving the scene via RDP was also two orders of magnitude faster. This led to a flurry of troubleshooting, and we have since narrowed the problem down to Softimage's "High Quality Viewport" "feature."

The speed-ups after disabling HQV are nothing short of mind-blowing. For example, unloading a referenced model took 250 seconds before the fix, and only 3 seconds after the fix. Meanwhile, a scene that took 15 minutes to save saved in only 30 seconds after the fix was deployed.

One artist's wife was quoted as saying, "Thanks to the Qualitybleed bug being fixed, my husband finally comes home from work on time! Now if I can just get him to stop spending all his free time watching Houdini tutorials..."

Note that the "high quality viewport" preference that causes the problem is enabled by default, Psyop doesn't generally use HQV in our scenes, so people are likely to be affected by this problem whether they are HQV users or not.

To fix the problem, affected softimage users can run the following Python command:
Application.SetValue("preferences.Display.high_quality_viewport", False, "")

There is still much research to be done to find out what kinds of scenes/models are more susceptible to the problem, but we thought we'd bring it up now in case it's costing others time. Given that the problem was tied in with RDP, it's likely that video drivers could be playing a role, but so far we weren't able to find any settings that would magically eliminate the problem without just disabling HQV entirely.

Psyop is on a mix of NVidia Quadros and we ran tests with a few different drivers, including the recommended ones. We also saw the same problem across two different workstation images, in both Softimage 2013 and Softimage 2014, and on a remote worker's home workstation. So we have reason to suspect it's not a highly specific aspect of our configuration that was causing the problem. No testing has been done yet on Linux.

We will be sure to keep this list updated as more information becomes available. Share your stories in the comments below if you have been affected by this ~100X slowdown in performance, or if you encounter a workstation that is somehow unaffected.

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