Ditto the problem.
Krita 2.8.79.18
Wacom bamboo, latest driver.

Strokes were registered smoothly in Photoshop, Zbrush (even with high polygon counts), as well as in GIMP.
With Krita, same canvas size and dpi, it's lagging, a bit, not really to point becoming unusable.
For other folks having the slow problem, try to turn off "Scalable Distance" in Tool Options to see whether it helps.

Is there any developer working on Krita 2.9 kickstarter in this thread?

dniitall wrote:my sys specs:
anyway, i'm really happy Krita is getting better and better in the innovative sense but i think the code need some hugs and kisses as well

I agree. I love Krita anyway, but it's slow, even for me on Linux. Krita running slow isn't a problem unique to Windows. I don't have top-of-the-line hardware, but GIMP, which is I think an equally sophisticated free-software graphics application, when using the same image sizes and resolutions, runs much more smoothly, with less lag. Of course, GIMP is older, and therefore a more mature codebase. But still.

I make mixed-media comics with GIMP, Krita, and/or Inkscape. The final image files are always composited in either GIMP or Krita, depending on whether I'm working more with photos or digital painting. The image sizes and ppi are always the same for every comic page, and the complexity (number of layers and layer blending modes) tends to be pretty close to the same for every project too. But Krita always lags more when launching the application, when using brushes, when scaling a layer or image, when adding or removing layers, and when applying filter effects.

I'm using Krita 2.8.6 (with openGL enabled) on Fedora 20. I kind of feel like my exact hardware shouldn't matter, if you see a similarly sophisticated program like GIMP as a performance benchmark for comparison... But maybe it's not be entirely fair to compare Krita to GIMP?

...I hope this doesn't seem too negative. I just want to reaffirm that Krita can run a little too slowly even on Linux. I've used Krita for a few years, on different computers with different Linux distros, and it's always required the most computing resources of any application I use.

Well, it is quite different to compare Gimp to Krita, for example, on my system OpenGL just causes a cursor slowdown because my video card just doesn't work well in that respect. So software based solutions like gimp and mypaint have much faster cursors.
Of course, that is likely to be different on your system.

It's not that we don't hear these complaints, it is however likely that the slowdowns on Linux and Windows have different causes. For example, slangkamp and me did some timer tests yesterday, which showed that there's an node-graph update taking place during layer creation, which somehow is much slower on my system(3-4 times) than his(and we both run Linux). These things are not related to the OpenGL optimisations, which is what likely causes the slowdown for Nezumi, etc. If boud manages to get a license for vtune, he'll be able to find the exact culprits on windows very quickly.

I would also like to note that the slowdown on windows has happened because of an attempt to make Krita faster. I would like to take a moment to fully appreciate that irony.

Well, Krita is a much more sophisticated application than Gimp or Mypaint -- the brush engines are much more complicated, and Krita supports working in different colorspaces. Gimp is hardcoded for 8 bit rgb, Mypaint for 15 bit rgb. Sai is even more simple-minded, and besides, has quite a severe limitation in canvas size. The current development version of Gimp, which uses Gegl, is a bit more flexible (though not sufficiently so: ninedegreesbelow.com/gimpgit/gimp-hard-coded-sRGB.html), and very, very slow. It's a development version, of course, so that's not an indictment of Gimp.

The comparison with Photoshop is more interesting: Photoshop does a level-of-detail optimization that makes it quite fast for big canvases. Dmitry is working on implementing that for Krita, with promising results. It's not certain that that'll make it for 2.9, though.

Basically, this thread is about a possible regression in current Krita development builds on Windows. If you use 2.8, then you're not affected by that. Krita 2.9 will perform better, on the same hardware. But you still might feel it could or should be better. It's highly improbably though that that feeling will ever really change -- performance can always be better -- but we're always trying to improve

In the end, every application has their own performance characteristics: one regularly meets advice about merging layers at some point during painting to control memory consumption and so on for Photoshop users, or brush settings for Painter.

The problem with adding a layer is different though. I have investigated a bit more and it's actually not the compositing and opengl code that's slow there. It turns out most of the time is spend updating the GUI, that's all the menus and buttons outside the canvas. I guess nobody had that on the radar so far.

So, I upgraded to 2.8.5 and immediately I noticed that it started up much much quicker. I tried loading up the old drawing I'd been experimenting on, but it was similarly slow. Then I tried making a new file and it was fine, no speed trouble at all. OpenGL is still turned off, so that might be helping. Haven't tried much in the way of layers or anything, but at least it's more or less working now.

Best of luck with 2.9

i'd be happy to test some "strange" builds

starting Krita = ~11 seconds
creating new document = 6-9 seconds
new layer (empty doc) = ~1 second

and yes, it's seems like a GUI problem. when i take a screen shot while GUI lagging during the "new doc" it's clean and beautiful but i see cocktail

I have a patch that should reduce the amout of time needed to create a new layer. Due to some other work that's not submitted yet, but it should be possible to go in soon.

sounds good

here's a snap of the lagging when opening docs. this can NOT be seen if i take a screenshot

Not to discount the problem, but as a counterpoint -

I am running 2.83 x64 on a mid-range Surface Pro 3 (win 8.1 pro, i5 1.9ghz, 8gb ram, intel hd graphics 4400, 2160x1440 res) and it runs as well as anything else, with no particular issues that aren't also present in photoshop/gimp/etc.

Opening krita is ~4 seconds, creating a new document is also ~4 seconds. Creating a new layer is essentially instant. Drawing is smooth and doesn't lag unless I really try (by doing meaningless things like using a giant speedpaint brush and drawing in circles over and over).

Changing canvas size, zoom, opengl settings etc had no real effect on performance either way.

Not sure how much this helps anything, but it was this way "out of the box" for me, and no settings changes I've made have caused noticeable problems. There are some Surface-related problems with Krita, but I haven't run into anything that isn't present in other applications as well.

giblet wrote:Not to discount the problem, but as a counterpoint -

I am running 2.83 x64 on a mid-range Surface Pro 3 (win 8.1 pro, i5 1.9ghz, 8gb ram, intel hd graphics 4400, 2160x1440 res) and it runs as well as anything else, with no particular issues that aren't also present in photoshop/gimp/etc.

Opening krita is ~4 seconds, creating a new document is also ~4 seconds. Creating a new layer is essentially instant. Drawing is smooth and doesn't lag unless I really try (by doing meaningless things like using a giant speedpaint brush and drawing in circles over and over).

Changing canvas size, zoom, opengl settings etc had no real effect on performance either way.

Not sure how much this helps anything, but it was this way "out of the box" for me, and no settings changes I've made have caused noticeable problems. There are some Surface-related problems with Krita, but I haven't run into anything that isn't present in other applications as well.

If you are only using the default brushes and settings than yes, things are a bit quicker. However, if you have a custom brush set, custom patterns, or recent documents, krita's start up will slow down a bit. It's the slow layer functions more than anything that is an issue for me. The slow startup is annoying too, but I understand that part of that problem is the way Krita loads custom brushes, patterns, tags etc first. Hopefully a solution will happen in the near future, but these issues haven't stopped me from using Krita. It's still the best illustration software out there right now.

I love Krita (and may soon post some things I've done with it in this forum), and I also saw the comment that this thread is about development builds, but I'm experiencing serious lags with brush strokes and adding layers (and less so with load-up) with the newest release build for Windows.*

I scoured the web for any place to download an earlier 2.8 version (as it seemed to me was recommended in this thread), and I couldn't find anything older than 2.8.79.3.

And I assume that means 2.8.0? --though reading this thread again I see someone had success using 2.8.5.

Questions: what exactly is the newest version where this lag is not an issue, and where the h__l can I download it?

thx

*I believe my machine is quite "beefy" enough for Krita; it has a newer and higher-end ATI graphics card, with a quad-core intel 3.4GHz processor, 4GB ram, with the OS and programs etc. installed and run from a solid-state drive.

I've sort of fixed the startup issue -- now the brushes and presets load in the background again. That'll lead to crashes, though, if you start Krita and close it again before it's done loading the brushes and presets. Sven has landed a patch that makes layer manipulation a bit faster. I'll try to do new builds this week, hopefully after Dmitry's latest transform tool and liquify work lands in git master.

As for release builds: everything with .78 in its version number is a development build. We host development builds on files.kde.org/krita; the official downloads are still here: http://kritastudio.com/desktop.html. I still need to do the latest bugfix build, the latest available is 2.8.3.0. There is no 2.8.5 for Windows yet.

Thanks, though I'm still left wondering where to find a development (/bugfix?) or release build that is version 2.8.5 or lower. There are only .78 versions at that dev builds URL you provide, and there doesn't seem to be any place to get release or dev builds versioned 2.8.5 or lower.

Uhm, actually, if you experience lag with brushstrokes, you may want to check the brush smoothing options...

Somehow weighted smoothing was the default when I helped someone with a similar problem at FACTS yesterday.