Have the particle system run on GPU?
I dont know much on how the particle system works in Blender, but when i was using it to make small effects (around 2k particles) it eats up performence like crazy. And i have pretty high end hardware.
I have noticed that the particles are calculated on the CPU, is it possible to put particle effect calculation on the GPU, to increase it's performence?
2 Comments
Actually the particle system in blender in in a big overhaul currently. In 2.91 running in dev mode, there is a new particle system Its already can show way more particles, but.. its not the old system. Its node based, and while in development stage there is not much what you can do with it. If you want to play with it (its not stable) : youtube.com/watch
With the current blender version, it can create millions of particles even on a fairly slow computer, and it can render points directly without using instances. I don't know id it works for particles, but if it doesn't, you can export the particle setup as an alembic file, and then import it, and the particles will be imported as a baked point setup using the mesh sequence cache modifier, and it can handle millions of particles. Also geometry nodes works well for particle simulations, and allows more effects.