Sorry, folks, if I'm late to the dance.

I think the OP as well as Mr. G and others who complain/worry about performance in iClone are definitely right, but I also don't think it's anything new. I have always had a top (or near top) machine to work with iClone and yet I can remember struggling even two or three years ago to get more than a character or two in a scene.  As a matter of fact, it's when iClone is the most vulnerable -- I've gotten sets themselves with millions of polys and textures that are no problem whatsoever inside of iClone, but the minute you get to three or more avatars you can bring even my 12GB Titan GPU to its knees.

I've taken to using dummy avatars as placeholders for scenes where there are more than two characters, delaying until the very end (after all animation has been laid down) putting the real ones in, and this has been workable to me (although it often results in scenes that then can't be saved/reloaded -- if anyone here has seen my "Cowboys" video, where I have around 8 avatars in the scene at any one time, the minute I would do all replacements I needed to render because the *slightest* thing -- even moving a low-poly rock -- would crash the system).  I had hoped there would be ways to export lo-poly standins (that was one of the features touted by iClone) but even these aren't very workable (so there must be something about the avatar itself that just has too much baggage with it).

I'm guessing most of the RL devs use, for testing at least, only one or two avatars.  Perhaps if they worked routinely with four or five in a scene they would understand the issues.  I can't even send them one of my scenes for testing because it won't save (it just crashes).  

For others -- if you want to work with iClone for now I would highly recommend sticking to two avatars at the most in any scene OR use the dummy ones for standins until the very last moment.  This is as close to a workaround as I have come up with, although if others have one I'd love to hear about it (the real workaround that RL could implement would be multi-res avatars -- you load in the lo-poly/lo-res one to work with but it will then auto-substitute the higher res one at render time.  This is, indeed, what software like Max does, it allows you to have stand-in objects that are placeholders but otherwise work and look pretty much like your higher res ones that swap in for renders -- I'm too sleepy right now to remember the term but you get the idea).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

I only have a 1080 TI with 11 gigs of memory, and upgrading in 2020 had been on my to do plan, but no income put a stop to that thinking.

I am working on a large scene and IClone performance is so slow it affects how much work I can get done.

I thought maybe it was the fact my poker table has a chip rack with hundreds of chip props, but even if I hide the poker table and do something as simple as rename a prop in Scene Manager, and IClone takes 15 seconds to recover.

I realize my project has 539,000 triangles, but Reallusion needs to take lessons from Microsoft Flight Simulator. They can draw entire cities on the fly and my poker room with 1 table and no cards or chairs, and I spend 55 minutes out of an hour waiting and 5 minutes working.

A 3080TI and super fast pc would help some, but I think some rethinking on when IClone needs to redraw is needed. The view port updates fast when I move around the scene, but then 15 seconds go by before I can touch it again.

It seems to be worse in the latest updates, but maybe I just use IClone more and notice it.

Creator of the free website:
PixelDatabase.Net
A Free Online Text Based Image Editor

Win 10

Nvidia 1080 8gb

32 gb ram

256 ssd with 1tb hybrid hdd

I’m working on minimal and still shit frames and load times

we willl help get this right,  when I tell people I use iclone and cc3,  i want them to fear me and look at us with respect and awe, not snicker!   we have great tools here,  they just need some guidance and love. <3

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I hear you... :)

I'm using the word optimization,  specifically from my gaming experience especially from beta's ....in the beta's everything ran clunky - because everything was being loaded to ram and not optimized ...over time they add culling,  optimize image files and tweak processes / codecs to speed up performance.   iclone realtime basically follows the same concept,  and your evidence fantastically makes that apparent.    It's not just the code to clear the ram,  but optimizing images,  optimizing compression algorithms, and well thought out logistics .... like with headshot...how could they possibly mix and match a unique facial texture with a generic neck skin texture and expect it to have any resemblence to what the artist wanted from the unique image ?   that's just bad logistics and forcing an issue .....it's many little things that is actually making iclone and cc3 less pro and more "one algorithm fits all" - that's a techie making artistic decisions.   no sorry. -draws lines-  

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Job, I totally understand what you are saying. I was always advocating here on the forum for user responsibility, when someone was trying to through unimaginable stuff into iClone (like models from cgtrader or other sources with millions or polygons or crazy texture) and demanding it to behave.
Yes, we should be responsible for brushing up our models and characters, while building a scene. And I am willing to help to those who does not know how.
But there are 2 sides of a coin. RL should be responsible for delivering a product, which is at least optimized to the level where ordinary user like myself would not find some outrages stuff to complain about.
And that is a case now.
I am always trying to be fair and backup my statements/complains. And if someone proves otherwise with hard evidence, I'd be glad to take my hat off, admit I was wrong and shut up.

Again, here are facts.
PBR character with 2K texture for critical body parts exported out of CC.
The overall texture size is 39 MB - 83 files

Same PBR character converted to CC3+ with medium 2K quality and exported out of CC
The overall texture size is 234 MB - 124 files

I am not a developer and I do not know the way it internally works and what else might be causing high VRAM utilization. But I see that huge difference, plus some obvious texture size *abuse* and I start asking questions.
I can optimise both PBR and CC3+ character, but in the end the difference in VRAM utilization would be at the same level (when compared).

BTW it is a great idea to have everything baked in iClone including DHS (if that is even possible) for characters which are customized and ready for render.

I agree @animagic with the baking,  that can at least help offset these super high settings

but aside from this, it's obvious from first going out of memory from my working file.....to a more stable render by simply restarting the program, that any edits I made in first project,  then remove during the creation process,  stays in ram -  else reloading the program should have had same out of memory error.   they need to flush their memory better when things are removed -  it's like that memory leak thing I've been trying to say for years... but now the bloat has gotten to the point that it's hindering creativity.

I appreciate the stuff Iclone and CC3 do very much,  else I wouldn't care about performance.  You don't see me complaining about autodesk lol!!   Someone at RL is taking shortcuts and overlooking serious issues that is trashing iclone and cc3 performance.  it has to be addressed. Too many great features to be lost to poor coding.

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I use 2k for the face, 1k for the rest, which has helped me. In one scene, I used 10G out of 11 of VRAM, so I needed to so something.

WARNING: The following is mere speculation on my part. I'm not privy to RL's design.

I think that if we could bake (meaning we don't need all the adjustments in iClone anymore) we would end up with the usual texture set. At one point everything has to be flattened like that anyway in order to render.

The textures you see are used to generate the final texture set, unless I'm wrong and they are part of the DHS shader. Still, they are shared so their contribution shouldn't multiply proportionally.

I appreciate that people are struggling and their experiences will hopefully encourage RL to further optimize. On the other hand, I do like the new features and the visual improvements I achieve for my characters.

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Yes , I have duplicated them , you are right ,  different story.  Tongue & Nails.png -  24mb  thats huge.