As I venture deeper into smoke &pyro one issue I am facing are the extremely LONG sim times and inefficient playback times of my cached sims.

I am using a voxel density of .01 and show 216 million density and collision voxels.
I've enabled ‘Use OpenCL’ on my Pyro solver.

Even after caching a 204 frame simulation which takes several hours with a 12 core Threadripper and dual Titan Volta GPUs I can only play back the simulation in the Geometry Viewer at about 1 fps.

This workflow simply makes it impossible to proceed and iterate.

I need the .01 voxel density otherwise the resulting smoke sims appear too ‘jagged’.

Attached are screen grabs of my Pyrosolver and caching SOPs info details.

Are there any tips or workarounds that people use to optimize smoke & pyro workflows? Are 216 million voxels simply too many?

You need to run a low-res proxy workflow, so the load off disk for the vieport is fast and the display is fast.

The viewport can be dynamically scaled for 3d textures, in display settings, but the loading off a disk is the killer - an m2 disk will help here.

Thanks by ‘low-res’ I assume you mean to simply reduce the voxel count? But my understanding is that by changing the voxel count you change the actual dynamics of the simulation, not just make it lower resolution.

You need to sim and test the look at a low enough resolution that you can iterate fast, but not so low that you lose the shape of your sim. Then test increases to the resolution before you sim high res.

VolumeResample the highres sim.