Hi all, I've been trying to move away from photoshop and use Krita more in my professional work but have been struggling with performance a fair amount sadly and so wondered whether there was anything I could do.

A lot of progress was made this year with the work from the kickstarter helping a lot, but I still find myself unable to use krita for anything past lineart and simple, experimental paintings. I am used to painting on the files the size of 5-6k pixels, 300 dpi. Sometimes a fair number layers, and a lot of really smooth air brushes for my soft lighting and rendering.

I've been keeping my files in the .psd format while going between the programs, and if for example I open a file that's 300mb (about average for my paintings) it will take a long time to open (much longer than photoshop), and then the lag in brush strokes makes painting with Krita unusable. I tried upping the values in the performance settings without much success.

Is it the case that Krita could receive more performance optimization in the future? My canvas size isn't too unusual in industry work. Any help or information will be appreciated! I can provide example source files if that would help too.

pc specs:
windows 10
intel i5-4570
16gb ddr3
wacom cintiq 13

Which version of Krita?

Krita 3.0.1.1 is already much faster than 2.9, but how well it performs depends a lot on your system (memory, gpu, display driver, cpu), on the color model you use for your images and so on. Other applications can influence performance, for instance virus scanners or "security" software like sandboxie. An AMD gpu performs much worse than an Nvidia or Intel gpu.

On my 24 gb desktop, which is a couple of years old, a 600dpi A4 image with a dozen or more layers is fine. We're always interested in finding ways to make Krita faster, but with the wide variety of systems out there in the real world, there will always be people who find Krita too slow to use for them. In any case, if you can share one of your big files with me, I can check whether anything unusual is going on.

(btw, .kra files are smaller than .psd files for the same pixel size/layer count. The real memory usage is shown in the status bar.)

That's right. I am currently on Krita 3.0.1.1. I've been using it since the version 2.8 or something like that and while the update made the software overall much much greater, I still have issues with performance. Slightly less, but still to the point I can't use it for big projects. I just use basic 8bit RGB setup for my artwork.

I am aware kra. files might be a better choice to work with in this case, and while I can't confirm it now I am almost sure that I did at some point try converting psd to kra with little difference. But that was closer to the initial Krita 3 release earlier this year.

You can find a sample image here. Let me know how it's working for you.
Thanks

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qs0w6ejxjku6z ... s.psd?dl=0

Well, the thing of psd vs kra is that psd cannot save all the things you can do in Krita. And kra loads and saves faster.

Your image isn't excessively big, doesn't have an excessive number of layers, uses only about 800M of ram, and with my current development build on Linux, I can work with it fine...

On my Win10 SP3, with only 4gb of ram and the lowest-end CPU there was, Krita does take a long time to start, too -- much longer than on my Windows desktop for some reason -- but the image loads fine. And I can deface your work with a big red brush without any problems on any of the layers. No brush lag at all, and the base-level SP3 is really an underspecced machine.

I'm not sure about the next steps... If you download debugview (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sys ... gview.aspx) and start it before starting Krita, the log might tell us if you've got working OpenGL and working CPU vectorization (if it says "legacy arithmetics" it's clear what's up).

Hello. Here's the file. Hope it can prove useful.

Thanks

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ba2bapeap3oe9 ... 5.LOG?dl=0

Hi,
I also have quite big performance issues with Krita(3.0.1.1) - basically, painting on rather small canvas(A4 300ppi) is pain in the ****, almost every brush have significant lag, so making any kind of enviro painting can take ages. Mostly, I use some textured brushes but recently I switched to "basic" round brush from Deevad set( basic flow brush) and problem still exists. Instant Preview also doesn't work - with most of the brushes it's useless because of rendering lag and that's the case when it's working because most of the time it doesn't. To make IP work I need to go to brushes, uncheck and check again... then it's working but with lag on every stroke end. When I disable IP by hitting SHIFT + F the Krita freezes for couple of minutes, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I like Krita very much and I don't want to go back to Windows and Photoshop but such performance issues makes Krita unusable for any professional work.

p.s.
There is also "problem" with big consumption of RAM - just for test I've opened my older painting and situation looks like this: normal RAM usage with Thunderbird and maybe browser is something like 2GB to 3BG but when I start Krita it's up to 8GB. After opening file( 8950 x 4186, 8bit, sRGB-elle-V2-srgbtrc) System Monitor shows 12,3GB of RAM usage.

My current setup:
- OS: Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon
- ssd drive
- 16GB of RAM
- AMD FX6300 cpu overclocked to 4,5GHz
- GeForce GTX 970 4GB

sythgara wrote:Hello. Here's the file. Hope it can prove useful.

Thanks

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ba2bapeap3oe9 ... 5.LOG?dl=0

I don't see anything weird in the krita parts of that log, but those really weird smartscreen errors are weird and suggest something is not setup properly on your system. OpenGL and vectorization extensions are all recognized properly. You can try whether resetting the Krita configuration helps, but I suspect that your Windows installation is a bit of a mess and that there's stuff running in the background that interferes with Krita.

mbukowski wrote:Hi,
I also have quite big performance issues with Krita(3.0.1.1) - basically, painting on rather small canvas(A4 300ppi) is pain in the ****, almost every brush have significant lag, so making any kind of enviro painting can take ages. Mostly, I use some textured brushes but recently I switched to "basic" round brush from Deevad set( basic flow brush) and problem still exists. Instant Preview also doesn't work - with most of the brushes it's useless because of rendering lag and that's the case when it's working because most of the time it doesn't. To make IP work I need to go to brushes, uncheck and check again... then it's working but with lag on every stroke end. When I disable IP by hitting SHIFT + F the Krita freezes for couple of minutes, etc.

Well, that's not normal. It is a problem on your system, not something that everyone else experiences. A4 at 300ppi is only 2480x3508 pixels, which is quite small. You shouldn't have any lag with an image size like that, even on basic 4gb laptops with an intel i3 -- like my Surface Pro 3.

mbukowski wrote:There is also "problem" with big consumption of RAM - just for test I've opened my older painting and situation looks like this: normal RAM usage with Thunderbird and maybe browser is something like 2GB to 3BG but when I start Krita it's up to 8GB. After opening file( 8950 x 4186, 8bit, sRGB-elle-V2-srgbtrc) System Monitor shows 12,3GB of RAM usage.

You can see how much memory Krita uses in the statusbar. But the theory is simple: apart from some memory for resources like brushes, you can calculate what Krita uses yourself: (number of layers + 1) * width * height * 4 (for 8 bits rgba) gives you the ballpark figure: about 287mb if you create an image like that with a background layer and a transparent layer on top. Every extra non-empty layer will add about 144mb.

By default, Krita only uses half of available ram, so if you have 16gb of ram, Krita will start using its own swapfile after using 8 gb for image data, like layers and undo information.

On my Dell XPS 12 with 4GB of memory running Kubuntu, painting on such an image is smooth. And that's with the snap version of Krita, which doesn't even use vectorization.

mbukowski wrote:My current setup:
- OS: Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon
- ssd drive
- 16GB of RAM
- AMD FX6300 cpu overclocked to 4,5GHz
- GeForce GTX 970 4GB

Nothing weird, except the AMD cpu. You can try to disable vectorization in the Performance tab of the settings dialog: some people report that that helps. It might help you...

Thanks for quick answer.
I've already tried disabling vector optimizations, also turning off and on OpenGL and increasing amount of memory... without luck.
Maybe there is something wrong with nvidia drivers, because sometimes, especially with bigger brushes I see artifacts/tearing.

I don't really know where to digg - is it possibile that Mint itself is a problem? My current Mint 18 is not a clean installation, I've upgraded from 17.3 and from mint 17 to 17.3 I was using Krita from Dmitry ppa.
I've checked Krita on Win7 64bit and performance isn't very different, only major difference is in IP... which is working, sometimes it needs time to finish rendering strokes, but it's working.

Is there any correlation between Krita performance and KDE? I never liked KDE but maybe I will try Mint 18 KDE or Kubuntu.

No, the desktop doesn't make a difference, but we have had some reports that compiz-based window manager / compositors do weird stuff.

personally i have found that Krita works best in the plasma5 desktop, krita seems to be very laggy in gnome-based desktops ,unity , cinnamon, xfce ,etc ,even if you use a small brush size 5.0 , its like a huge delay. I hate that . But in the kde desktop , krita runs great and fast ,beware though, , use only plasma 5.7+ or else you wont have .kra thumbnails, so i use kde neon, but you can use tumbleweed too ,anything with latest plasma, or KaOS , but kaos is not that good because you can only use 64bit code in it

Whereas I, actually, mostly use Gnome when I'm using Krita on Linux -- mainly because it has a working wacom settings module. No lag either...

In my case, small brushes have no lag, maybe except textured ones. With something like Basic flow brush which is round with softer edges It's more or less ok until it reaches from 200 to over 300 px size and that's not some extreme size. In CS6 with similar brush, some minor lags appears when brush reaches over 600 px size. Even with 1000 px brush there is not so much problem with painting.

I have a cintiq companion (i5,8gb ram) configured entirely for and around krita on linux. I also struggle with lag problems even after optimising it with all the tips I could find, but It is still my #1 favorite however. I wil just keep an eye in this thread I guess.

Ps: Boudewijn, as you own a 13 inch cintiq wich is basically the same device as mine, I would like to humbly suggest you trying Manjaro KDE. It takes some tweaks, but once set up, it is a lean mean drawing machine. I now have pinch-pan-zoom control, full buttun functionality so i can draw in the couch without keyboard, i can set absolute or relative mode over multiple screens, calibrate (even manually), stuff that even the windows driver can not. Dunno, it might help, or you might have some really good reason for not doing so.

Anyway krita rocks

Hello everyone,

I would just like to ask whether earlier versions of Krita were less taxing than the current versions? Although the answer is probably obvious I would like to know why and what system set up is actually the best way to go. I've tried running anything from 2.9 through 3.1.1 across different Linux distros. I even tried it on windows and I have to say it was the worst experience for me compared to the earlier versions.

I used to enjoy krita very much and ran it for a long time on crunchbang waldorf. In their repo, the versions were 1:2.4.4-3. It ran perfectly well, although moving the windows or dragging it was laggy but until recently I've never had these crazy performance issues. Now that I can no longer run crunchbang because of its lack of support, I got it to work for 6 months on Bunsenlabs, the successor to crunchbang. But after having to reinstall everything(because I like to experiment and distrohop), Krita for whatever reason no longer works on Bunsenlabs either. That would be version 2.9 I think. I just get the usual crash at start up. Using the AppImage versions is just too much for my current linux machine (intel Nuc i7-5557U) and also lags there as well. In Ubuntu derivatives, AppImage runs ok and then it doesn't after a while. My fans also start kicking in like crazy. Just today I have tried Krita on Solus latest release. While it runs great, performance suffers when I try to get into heavy drawing. The resolutions I'm using are anywhere from 2000 to 8000px either 100 or 300 dpi. I never had these problems with the earlier versions. I wish I can download them somewhere!

*UPDATE*
Ok, so apparently I was a dummy and forgot to make sure to install the X.org driver for my wacom before starting Krita on a new install. That's what caused the crashes. So just to make it clear, Krita 2.8.5 is pretty stable under Debian Jessie or Bunsenlabs -which is what I'm using. I'm on a NUC 5i7RYH and everything just runs fantastic and doesn't push my system AT ALL. Just wanted to put that out there in case it helps someone else in the future. Thank you.