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Recommended CPU for ZBrush on a 1440p ultrawide monitor

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#1

Hello

I have some performance issues with ZBrush on my 1440p ultrawide monitor. I also have an older 1080p widescreen monitor and a 1080p Wacom Cintiq 13HD and ZBrush works fine on those devices.
The performance issue only occurs on my 1440p ultrawide if a mesh requires a lot of space (in terms of pixels on the screen). Be it because i zoom in a lot or the mesh simply being very large. Polycount doesn’t matter at all and sculpting itself always works well. Mainly panning and zooming becomes a pain in the butt and my fps drops to about 5-10.
The official system requirements seem to only take 1080p monitors into consideration.

I would like to know from people who use a similar monitor like me (1440p ultrawide, resolution 3440 x 1440) what CPU they use without any performance issues in ZBrush.

My specs:
OS: Windows 10 Pro x64
CPU: i7-4790K @ 4.00GHz
RAM: 16GB
GPU: Radeon RX 5700 XT
SSD: Samsung 860 QVO 1 TB

#2

When zooming in, try disabling shadows in Render > Render Properties. This will disable the real time shadows that have a significant performance impact when zoomed in.

The actual size of your monitor probably just punishes bad working habits more severely.

Remember that in most cases, eventually you want to transition to a mesh with a a low poly base and multiple levels of subdivision. In addition to requiring a mesh in this form for best results when posing, unwrapping, painting, and creating textures for export, tools in this form have optimizations that allow them to perform much better inside of the program, as they preview the lower subdivision levels when navigating or transforming. The more points you have on screen at once, the worse performance will be. Dense meshes at a single level of subdivision have a lot of points, and no lower subd level to preview, and a larger resolution monitor gives you more screen space to put a lot of points on screen.

Working at a single subD level is best done while establishing form at the low to medium level of detail. Once you want to start working on ultra fine detail, you want a mesh with multiple subD levels. A mesh dense enough for fine detail with no lower subD levels will perform very poorly in the program.

Otherwise, the recommended system specs are here, and summed up thusly:

A fast processor with multiple cores is a key item because ZBrush is only CPU based. The more powerful, the better.

If you feel Zbrush is not performing correctly on your hardware, you need to contact Support.