Hi John,
"If I have a single forest object isolated, it's still taking upwards of twenty seconds to jump from one frame to another, and it puts a full hit on one of the cores of my CPU."
That's really unusual performance hit, even that sometimes very large areas are quite resource exigent. Are you using animated geometry?
There is option under
Display - Build - Manual Update, which would disable updating of Forest object in Viewport (in some specific situations it could be handy) - with this option marked the Forest object will be updated just during rendering process.
Usually, very good performance is given by the
Points-Cloud mode, but in some cases
Adaptive /
Proxy modes would give better results. I would suggest you to switch between those, to check if there is any significant improvement.
Apart of that, let me mention, that when
Camera's
Limit to visibility feature is used, Forest is forced to rebuild, any time camera is moving. To deactivate it, you should use the
Clear button and double check you have the
Auto assign to active view unmarked.
Even that all view-port rendering is handled by 3ds Max and Forest Pack has no influence on it, the problem eventually might be related to the graphics driver. Would you please try to change temporary the 3ds Max's display driver from "Nitrous" to "Legacy Direct3D", to check if there is some difference (
Customize - Preferences - Viewports - Choose Driver).
Hope you'll find these hints useful.
Best regards,