Hi, I've been using Krita since 2.8 on and off, and I think it's a fantastic program and all the developers should be sincerely congratulated for the incredible job so far.

With that said I want to ask the community and devs to help me out here, ever since 3.0 I've noticed a slowdown in performance when drawing, and it is worse when trying to paint. I have OpenGL on, I have adjusted the spacing of the brushes I use, I even try to work with at most 10 layers, and with really small canvases, since large canvas sizes past 2000px begin to lag the program noticeably. Every stroke I do is subject to this little loading bar at the bottom (the instant preview I assume), and sometimes while drawing the stroke just lags behind on it's own. And I'm not even using a "big" brush.

If possible I'd like to kindly ask for some tips on how to improve (drastically) Krita's performance, since I've been forced to work with other programs instead of krita because of this and I find it really odd. ¿Is there any kind of profiling tool I can do to single out what kind of behaviour is affecting my work? plus a small guide to use it? Because if things continue like this, I'll have to continue using SAI to draw and paint and I'm honestly trying to champion open source software with my colleagues so they make the switch.

Either way, hopefully this thread can become useful for others who need tips on how to improve performance via brush settings, app preferences or hardware configuration.

Thanks in advance,

My specs are:
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate
CPU: Phenom II X4 965 BE
Tablet: Wacom Intuos Pro 5 with Driver 6.3.15-3
RAM: 4GB DDR3
Graphics Card: Sapphire Vapor-X / ATI Radeon 6770 HD - GDDR5 1GB RAM

You can try to turn off Instant Preview. If you are working with a smaller canvas size, it doesn't provide as much value.

View > Instant Preview mode.

Try turning it off and see what happens.

scottpetrovic wrote:You can try to turn off Instant Preview. If you are working with a smaller canvas size, it doesn't provide as much value.

View > Instant Preview mode.

Try turning it off and see what happens.

Hi Scott, thank you for your prompt response. I'm using the US Letter (300 dpi) preset as the base canvas size to test this issue, which I don't think it's that small. I turned the Instant Preview, and it did improve a little, however it's still not as fast as it should be, or at least not as much as 2.8 was.

Aside from this I also noticed that if you draw without releasing the mouse button / tablet pen tip and just continue to "scratch" fill a surface with "one single stroke" it lags progressively until the line is visibly lagging behind the cursor.

I heard there was a profiler bundled into Krita, but aside form turning the option ON, ¿is there anything I can do to test this issue to help out the development team? I'll try to tinker with it a bit more to see what can I come up with. I'll even try to test it out in a linux distro (I have Linux Mint 17 lying around somewhere) to see If I can draw a point of comparison.

Anyway, hopefully others have more tips to improve Krita's performance from the get go, not only for myself but for other artists who have similar issues.

I am here looking for solutions to Windows performance issues also.

I'll try some of the suggestions here, such as turning off preview mode. and some other suggestions found on topic "Krita brushes lag and sluggishness ", such as changing High Quality Filtering to Bilinear.

I am curious if running under Linux would be worth the effort to setup dual boot. I am familiar with Linux and could try a lightweight distro such as XFCE w/ kde libs.


My current system:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit, Service Pack 1
Windows Experience Index rating of 6.8
Krita swap on SSD C:\ Drive with 70+ GB free space
16 GB RAM, DDR3 1866MHz
AMD A8-6600 APU (3.1 GHz Quad Core Processor)
with RADEON R7 integrated graphics (1GB graphics memory)
Latest AMD Radeon Crimson Drivers
Latest AMD Chipset Drivers
Huion H610 Tablet, latest drivers

It's quite likely that it's the AMD GPU and CPU that are problems: the CPU won't support vectorization as well as Intel CPU's and the GPU + driver won't support OpenGL as well as NVidia or Intel GPU's. On Linux, the AMD GPU will be an even bigger problem, with an even worse driver.

You can also try to vary the spacing of the brushes -- that might give an acceptable line quality/performance trade-off for your work, and would help both on Linux and on Windows.

You don't have to install Linux to test it, btw -- just download a live image, boot it, download the Krita appimage as the test user, make it executable and run it.