@Rikstopher I took your file animated all bones and ran through a profiler.
single core
multi core
so judging by this most time is actually spent drawing the frame?
You can’t see in the screenshot because the callstack is so high, but a significant portion of the drawing is spent in blender::bke::mesh::normals_calc_verts
But that is of course a debug build, let’s get some numbers from a release build by using SCOPED_TIMER_AVERAGED.
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X 12-Core Processor
| - | Average |
|---|---|
| DRW_draw_view | 1.95ms |
| normals_calc_verts | 0.54ms |
| BKE_key_evaluate_object_ex | 2.47ms |
So in a release build the story shifts a bit. 2.5ms for BKE_key_evaluate_object_ex is still not bad though but there is room for improvement. As far as I can tell the loops in static void key_evaluate_relative are not threaded which might be an easy win. But looking at the code it could use a face lift in general.
Out of curiosity I can that with blender restricted to 4 threads to simulate a less powerful CPU.
| - | Average |
|---|---|
| DRW_draw_view | 2.82ms |
| normals_calc_verts | 1.43ms |
| BKE_key_evaluate_object_ex | 2.15ms |
oddly enough BKE_key_evaluate_object_ex is faster with fewer threads, I ran that a few times just to sanity check. Always the same result within margin of error.