This is an ongoing issue I have with Krita since I started using it. Krita is slow to open (not so much on 2.8.x), slow to create new documents (slower than the linux version) and is sluggish in general. Brush strokes lag to the point of me not being able to produce anything with my tablet or mouse. Only using the program and closing all the other aplications doesn't seem to have any effects at all. It still is slow. Even following the old advice on Blender Artists to downgrade to 2.4.x/2.5.x doesn't do anything to improve performance. Also, turning OpenGL on makes Krita even slower.

Here are my specs:

-AMD Athlon II P340 2.2 GHz
-8 GB RAM
-ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250
-Windows 8.1

My laptop also has Fedora 20, which was installed with the sole purpose of using Krita, although the program still is sorta slow and has annoying issues with multiple monitors and not maximizing properly from one monitor to the other, but that's a different issue.

It may seem weird to ask, but GIMP and MyPaint work flawlessly under Windows. Why that's not the case with Krita?

For me Krita works just fine but I have to admit that latest builds are opening much slower and creation of document takes much longer, then previously.

Well, I might give it another try with a clean Windows 8.1 install(since MS still need a few more years to figure out how you can remove all the **** that gets installed along with Visual Studio), though I'm not very optimistic about it.


EDIT- After installing it (version 2.8.3 x64) on a clean install of Windows 8.1, I noticed something quite unusual as I was testing it. The program lags horribly (as usual), execpt when the canvas is zoomed in 200%. It still lags with the mouse if i move it too far and fast. Also, the canvas is always portrait mode, even if I set it to be landscape.

I suspect it's your graphic card the problem.
If I read correctly on wikipedia it supports only opengl 2.0, which if I remember correctly isn't enough for Krita I fear.

I remember trying to use Krita with an in Intel gma 950 and, while my tablet pc could handle well both photoshop and painter, kryta was impossibly slow with it.

Azzart wrote:I suspect it's your graphic card the problem.
If I read correctly on wikipedia it supports only opengl 2.0, which if I remember correctly isn't enough for Krita I fear.

I remember trying to use Krita with an in Intel gma 950 and, while my tablet pc could handle well both photoshop and painter, kryta was impossibly slow with it.

Krita works properly without any lags under linux(using the open source ati drivers nonetheless). Also, there's the weird canvas behavior of me not having any major lag when the canvas is zoomed in 200% with or without OpenGL turned on.

That doesn't give me any hopes to switch applications, unless I move the entire setup to linux. I don't personally think the program should assume you have a high end machine or should be compiled like that. Where's is the flexibility I read in this forum when Krita was comprared with SAI in terms of performance?

Hm... Which opengl settings are you using? You could try to disable the texture buffer option and setting the scaling mode to linear. I don't have an ATI card to check with, unfortunately.

As for slow startup in recent builds -- I need to look into that. I suspect that the issue is that we now load some things like brushes and presets in the gui thread instead of in the background, because loading those in the background often meant that certain presets got broken on loading.

boudewijn wrote:Hm... Which opengl settings are you using? You could try to disable the texture buffer option and setting the scaling mode to linear. I don't have an ATI card to check with, unfortunately.

As for slow startup in recent builds -- I need to look into that. I suspect that the issue is that we now load some things like brushes and presets in the gui thread instead of in the background, because loading those in the background often meant that certain presets got broken on loading.

I tested a number of OpenGL settings. They all exhibit the same behavior. OpenGL comes deactivated by default. Turning it on makes the program at least twice as slow for every possible task. Also, the canvas size and it's dpi doesn't matter at all, the behavior is the same (somewhat usable with the canvas at 200% zoom).

Perhaps the program is slow because I'm requesting an I/O operation (drawing with the tablet or mouse) when the program still is using the same thread to load things and won't give up the command to the I/O operation? I noticed excessive CPU usage when Krita is running, even by itself(all of my tests were done with Krita being the only open aplication)

EDIT- After some testing while I tried to record a video to show the bug, I discover that only the blending brushes do lag. OpenGL being on or not doesn't do much except affect performance of the rest of the app.

using latest build (2.9 pre-alpha) here and, yeah....well, takes a looong time to start as well as creating new layer, merging layers, have had several crashes when brushes lag. feels like a barely working version

i hope final 2.9 will get better

The thing is, the opengl code didn't change in the last couple of development builds -- the last change in that code was in June. Same for layer blending code. The brush code did change, with the new smoother line options, however. But I've checked on my test machines (intel gpu, nvidia gpu, 4 - 32 gb of memory), and I just don't see a slowdown.

Hi Boudewijn

I looove Krita atm. It's my main illustrating tool, but I must admit it really does have a lot of lag and when it comes to rearranging layers (Drag and Dropping them), using the visibility options, (the eye icon), and the startup is about 30 to 40 seconds slower to open than say Manga Studio, Mischief, Sai, and even Photoshop. The only other program that takes as long or longer to get past the splash screen and start up is Corel Painter. It is not horribly slow cause I use Krita every day for something, I even have it set to open when windows starts, but again it could most definitely get faster in the startup and layer functions areas .

Hm, checking here on my horribly slow computer.

Yes Krita is slow to start-up: This has to with all the plug-ins (basically all dockers, all filters, all brush engines, and more) getting loaded at startup, no clue what could be changed about this.
New file creation is also slow, 12 seconds compared to startup's 40 seconds. I suspect it's loading all the resources, this will probly be eased up by the resource manager.

Layer merging seems slowest with blending modes active.
My test was a 300dpi a4, with a black-white gradient on the lowest layer, and a rainbow gradient on top layer, with soft-light blending mode. Merging took long enough for me to count to 4.

It's a windows issue because even in virtual box running linux on top of windows it launches faster.

Startup on Windows is slower than on Linux because the Windows file system is really slow. And right now, we load all brushes and presets in the main thread because of a dependency issue; that used to happen in the background, and will again happen in the background when I'm done with the resource bundle work.

my sys specs:

WIN 7 Ultimate x64
CPU - i7 3740QM @ 2.7 GHz
GFX - K2000M
RAM - 32GB @ 1600 GHz
HDD - 250GB SSD (main) + 2x2TB

this machine is enough for every application i have and i use a lot of demanding apps, yet Krita lags. and it does lag more then before
the startup alone is at least 4-5 times slower then 2.8.3
i had minimal lag when creating layers before but now, i have to wait up to 2 seconds
my crashes i had were during the same scenario. i rotate the canvas and use a brush. the brush begin to lag and boom! crash
i sent crash info in the crash pop-up

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

This seems to be primarily a windows problem then. My computer is far weaker than yours dniital, but it's still relatively fast with layer creation.

Do not mistake this for a dismissal, it just means that to find the bug, we need to use windows systems.
The problem is that I can't really think of what might be causing this... Maybe boost doesn't play well on windows? That's the only thing I can think of that would affect layer creation and brush-preformance. (Boost is a library we added to improve memory management, and it has made the linux version much faster) Boudewijn, maybe we need a test build where we disable boost, to see if that has any effect?

Either way, for endusers it might be an idea to create a benchmark file for yourselves