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Channels management
Substance 3D Painter generally tries to use VRAM as much as possible to calculate the results of the layer stack. However, when VRAM runs out of space, Painter needs to store the data somewhere, so it is sent to the RAM where it can be fetched later if it's needed again.
Much of the data stored in VRAM is channel data. Channels are uncompressed, so when working with multiple channels (height, basecolor, metallic, roughness etc.), Painter needs to store those textures at the document resolution for each channel. For example, a 32-bit height map is around 190MB. Each additional channel means the amount of data quickly adds up.
In addition to this image data, the VRAM also needs to hold all of the materials and substances used in the project to be able to compute the results of the layer stack. This means that for projects with high resolution textures or a complicated layer stack, there can be a lot of back and forth between RAM and VRAM which can lead to slowdowns.
So, to improve performance:
- When using fill layers or tools, disable channels that you don't need. You can also do this by setting the blend mode of a layer channel to "disable".
- Work at a lower document resolution for as long as possible. For example, if you need to export 4k textures, work at 2k for most of the project, then change to 4k to review and make adjustments before export.
Substance 3D Painter 2017.3 introduced the block compression system which makes transfers faster between system and GPU memory. However, this system is only enabled when the amount of free memory in the GPU is low. Having a GPU with a high amount of memory will still provide better performance.