I saw another thread about Krita being slow on Windows machines that some people even now seem to be experiencing. This is not the case with me. I am, however, using an i7 machine with 16gb of RAM and a 250gb SSD, so that may have something to do with it. BUT even with that I AM experiencing a really horribly slow useage when trying to apply some of the Gmic filters. Anyone familiar with David Revoy's work will be familiar with his line art and colouring sometimes using Gmic. I tried to replicate his results and failed miserably. Here is what I posted on his website and he suggested I post here since he doesn't use Windows. This is what I wrote about the Poster Edges filter:

"And I am getting NOWHERE near the resuilts you show here. The preview absolutely sucks compares to final result. In your example above you have an edge thickness of zero. This does zero for me. Bumping it all the way to max 5 produces ugly lines generally on the outside of colours. Edge Threshold up or down helps a little but not much. I have tried using it with 72 and 300dpi images. Solid colours and overlapping semi-transparent colours, again little to no difference. And as a general rule the G'mic filter is incredibly slow. On a few test filters (Bokeh, for one) I just sat there for several minutes while it processed an image with three differently coloured squiggled lines; in the end I had to cancel and give up. Same for several other filters. This was very disappointing to me since I love what you seem to have managed with it above."

I have tried using Gmic again with different filters, applied to very, very basic artwork (i.e. a few drawn lines). I simply had to cancel the actions each time while watching the percentage completion in bottom right corner shoot from 0 to 100 percent very quickly over and over. On one occasion when I cancelled it and closed the Gmic window I could no longer do anything in Krita and had to close the programme.

I'm not expecting any answers here, simply passing this along to the developers in case it is of any use.

EDITED: Right after posting this I went and tried the Poster Edges filter again. This time on 100% opaque colours at 72dpi. And of course it worked this time. Previously, I was using some parts of the image that were less than opaque so maybe that was where the problem was. My later remarks still stand, though.

It is true. In Windows filters GMIC run very slowly. In fact, they are useless. GMIC filters are used in GIMP too. In GIMP everything is OK. WTF?

Bubus wrote:It is true. In Windows filters GMIC run very slowly. In fact, they are useless. GMIC filters are used in GIMP too. In GIMP everything is OK. WTF?

Gimp uses a different system on windows to turn their code into a program(a compiler). We use visual studio, which is the official Microsoft compiler, and G'MIC has been designed in a way visual studio doesn't understand very well. We keep hoping newer versions of the visual studio compiler will better understand G'MIC, but it's very difficult and we'd like to spent time on bugs as well.

Gosh... I _really_ dislike all this "app X and app Y work, so Krita is broken, do something about it" posts. I guess developers of other projects get them, too, and in fact, I've seen posts like "Oh my god, WTF, Corel Painter is totally broken, but Krita runs, so it must be Corel Painter!!!". It's totally useless for me as a developer, it doesn't give me _any_ information that's useful to deal with a given situation. And I also dislike exclamations like "WTF". Passionately. Sorry, but I had to get this off my chest.

Anyway, be glad that the G'Mic plugin actually works at all on Windows. G'Mic's parser needs a lot of stack space, and doesn't seem to play well with MSVC. But, we have to use MSVC because the mingw compiler on Windows makes the rest of Krita really slow. I have to reset the stack size to 999999999 bytes, which means you need a lot of memory to use G'Mic on Windows. Maybe the 2015 version of Microsoft Visual Studio will be better: Michael Abrahams reports he doesn't need to reset the stack size, but I am still getting crashes when running on Windows.

And there are a number of big differences between Gimp on Windows and Krita on Windows:

* Gimp is built with the Mingw compiler, Krita with MSVC.
* Gimp plugins run in a separate process and communicate through IPC
* Gimp plugins, including the G'Mic plugin don't have to deal with deep color spaces (at least not in the 2.8 stable release of Gimp)
* Gimp's G'Mic plugin is developed by the G'Mic author, we have to develop the G'Mic plugin ourselves.

And finally, you're complaining in the wrong place. If G'Mic is really slow when built with MSVC, then that's not something we Krita developers can do anything about: it's not our code, it's a third party library.