Hello!

I'm a new linux user, still trying to find myself around. A few days ago I decided to try to install linux to use Krita, so I followed David Reevoy's blog to do so and used his scripts to install krita and vc library. And I'm in love with the program so far! It's amazing.

My problem comes when using large canvas (over 7K pixels). Whenever I try to move/crop/create a selection of parts of the drawing/or whole layers to move them around the canvas there's an annoying delay and graphic stuterring. Also selections have 3-5 seconds delay or more to appear or disappear. When using smaller canvas, around 2K there's also the same stuttering but like much faster, sometimes parts of the drawing disappear and reappear after a while on the spot I was dragging them.

I think the problem might be graphic related but I don't know if it's a common behavior or there's something I have to tweak/change or update/install to make it work smoothly.

My system specs are:

Intel core i5 2500K
WD Caviar Black 1TB
8Gb Ram G.Skill Ripjaws 1600 DDR3
Ati Radeon HD6870

I'm using Linux Mint 14 KDE as proposed by David Reevoy. And I'm using Ati Proprietary Drivers fglrx (ati catalyst 13.1), and seems to work fine, I have access to the control panel and using "fglrxinfo" seems to list everything fine. I have activated opengl and the other two options under Krita preferences, they improve the canvas rotation and panning but not the brush resizing or dragging.

Also whenever I add images and drag them around the canvas I suffer the same stutter and graphic delay, but I understand that maybe Krita isn't supposed to be used in that way (since it's more a production program, not image editing software). It might be important to add that I have a similar delay on Gimp but not as noticeable as in Krita. Just want to know if there's some way that I can figure out if the problem is because of my configuration/my hardware or the program itself.


Thank you very much for your time and sorry for bothering,
Herionz

No bother -- we want Krita to be a smooth experience. The problem might be the AMD graphics card with proprietary drivers. We don' t have access to that setup, so we cannot debug issues with it. Some people report better performance with the open source drivers. I myself am pretty happy with my lowly intel gpu

boudewijn wrote:No bother -- we want Krita to be a smooth experience. The problem might be the AMD graphics card with proprietary drivers. We don' t have access to that setup, so we cannot debug issues with it. Some people report better performance with the open source drivers. I myself am pretty happy with my lowly intel gpu

Hi Boudewijn!

Thank you for the fast reply! When I first tried Krita a few days ago it was with my integrated intel chipset graphics (HD 3000 if I recall well), performance was worse than with the dedicated VGA, but I had some issues with conflicts between the intel and ati displays at that point, and it was my fault due to how the bios was set up, so I can't really tell if it was because of the hardware or the drivers not being well installed. I was able to set it up better on a clean install of Mint yesterday. I haven't tried with the xorg drivers yet. I will try to clean the AMD proprietary drivers and switch to the Xorg ones later.

May I ask you, dev, how far have you stretched the canvas size/resolution and brush size while still keeping things smooth? Might help me to draw a line over what I should be expecting as optimal. Right now I'm going foward and backward between resizing the image when I have to use selections or crop/modify things, which is acceptable since it doesn't takes that long to resize but it's a little bit uncomfortable workflow.

Thank you very much again, Boudewijn!
Herionz

Well, on my desktop (32 gb memory, intel gpu, 8 cores), I regularly test with a 5000x4000 px image, both opengl and normal canvas, and I am satisfied with brushes at max size (1000px) -- but then, that might just be the developer remembering the trouble he had getting adequate performance at 1000x1000 and 50px brushes!

Actually there is a bug that makes the first selection very slow. You can test that by making a small selection and then adding to it. After there first selection it should get much faster.

Move tends to get slower with bigger images. Crop is pretty much instant here on 10000x10000.
i5 530M, 4 GB

Following your advice Boudewijn, I've finally switched to the Xorg open source drivers and the brush resizing animation using the shift + drag shortcut has become smoother, thank you. Performance when painting seems to be OK also!

I also have found out, although it's not related to krita, but in mypaint the ATi proprietary drivers have an issue where zooming out at increments different from 100%/50%/25% pixelate the lines, similar to an issue that photoshop had years ago if I recall well, althoug haven't experienced myself just heard about it . With the Xorg drivers that doesn't happen.


Slangkamp, I've tried out over a 10K canvas what you pointed out, and it's true, first selection I did took a really long time (~10 seconds) to appear even while being really tiny, next ones were faster, although making a selection equally as the canvas size took a long time also (similar to the first tiny one).

About the crop tool, I have to apologize because I used the wrong concept, I was referring to the action of modifying the image by dragging/resizing/cutting parts of it, like making a drawing or a painting and rescaling bits of it to adjust proportions or other issues. The crop tool works perfectly fine even at big resolutions, as you say.

The "move layer" tool is what gives most troubles for my workflow. Whenever I add an image to the canvas and move it around or I crop parts of a painting and move them around, the image has problems to follow up with the movement, it jumps around and takes a while to update the new position. Sometimes it tears or leaves behind parts of it like a duplicate artifact and they don't update correctly or take a while.. And it happens with the open source drivers too.

It's true that with bigger canvas the move layer tool becomes slower, but I'm also having the problem with photo images added to the canvas for texture or reference, that usually aren't bigger than 1000 pixels and over a canvas of ~3000x2000.

The interface layer thumbnails also take a while to update some changes when using the "move tool" at some times.

Again I don't know if all these issues I'm having are driver related (I'm using Xorg now, and having the problems stated above), hardware or due to the program. Hope it help you guys somehow!

Hello,

I have an update on the issue.

Today I was updating krita 2.7 pre alpha, using David Reevoy's script, and I got an error with the FFTW3 library. After checking around, I did a quick install of FFTW 3.3.3 following this (blog). After that krita update run correctly.

I opened Krita and noticed that it opens faster tahn before, even loading a new file takes less time. My issue with the adding images and move tool was practically solved, everything worked way smoother than before, even panning was faster, also filters worked way better!

I tested a few things and everything works flawlessly until I get around ~5K pixels files, then I get a strange stuttering, even my brush strokes stutter! But that didn't happened before, I was able to paint at 10K files without problem before this issue but wasn't able to use filters nor the move tool without lag and slowdowns even in smaller canvas. I've noticed though that the graphic stutter I experience just happens when I'm zoomed out at 10% (seeing the whole canvas) or most of the canvas, if I zoom in at 33%-50% on the canvas (with very large canvas, 8-10K), the graphic stutter dissapears and I can paint fine and use every tool fine.

Still the graphic stutter I experience now is less noticeable than the one I had before, but the problem is that now has extended to the zoom and brush tool, and at some points it's enough to difficult painting and working with the canvas.

I don't know if you changed something with the update or if it was because FFTW3, but my worry now is that, maybe I didn't installed correctly FFTW and that's why everything works fine, until I get into that particular situation (canvas above 5K size, zoomed out).

But I can't seem to find the right information about the topic, I have read that I should get Intel math kernel library to use in combination with fftw, but I haven't tried yet. Do you devs know about this topic or can point me where to find user friendly information related to this? Maybe the problem is that I lack certain libraries or to better configure my computer cpu drivers? Although I haven't seen much around this, when I once checked if I needed to add drivers for my i5 cpu over linux, most of what I found was related to graphics drivers not cpu computing issues, but most of the problems I have seem to be related to my cpu configuration and libraries rather than to my Ati graphic card.

Hope you may be able to help me, although the issue isn't that worrying at this point since I seem to be able to use any tool fine under my usual canvas sizes (A3 300ppi).

Thank you!
Herionz

FFTW doesn't influence there brush performance, it only give some speedup in blur and some other filters. The only library that has an effect on painting performance in Vc. You could check if Vc is installed, changing between OpenGL and no OpenGL makes a difference or change the precision slider in the brush settings.

slangkamp wrote:FFTW doesn't influence there brush performance, it only give some speedup in blur and some other filters. The only library that has an effect on painting performance in Vc. You could check if Vc is installed, changing between OpenGL and no OpenGL makes a difference or change the precision slider in the brush settings.

Hi slangkamp ,

I have VC installed and up to date, since it's noted by Reevoy under his installation guide.

I've tested disabling openGL and rotating or zooming becomes excruciating for the computer, plus the move tool works worse, as it always did, but the brushes work smoothly even at 10k or higher and panning also works well, so as you say, it's something related to the openGL not to fftw. With openGL active, panning/rotating and zooming works perfect, same as the brushes and the move tool until I reach the size threshold of the 6K pixels and zoomed out to see the full canvas, then it slows everything down, but when I manage to zoom in closely it doesn't slows down anymore, until I zoom out again. I have disabled " Enable OpenGL shaders" and "Use trilinear texture filtering" because they slow down a little bit more.

I will try to look into it that then, maybe the improve in performance was due to updating to KDE 4.10?.

Thanks for your help!
Herionz

Edit: Found the solution to the issue. After updating to kernel 3.8.4, OpenGL at large sizes started to work fine again, so I can paint/pan/zoom/rotate well. Move tool still has some sloppy moving/image tearing issues at large resolutions (above 5K pixels canvas) but works much better than first time, so maybe at some point it will work well at those. Pretty much very happy at this point with Krita!

Thanks for the help guys!.