Brush Stroke Lag

[Estoc]

Hello,  when I am attempting to make brushstrokes there is some considerable latency occurring.  The lag increases as the brush size increases, and as I make faster brush strokes.  To make straight lines one naturally has to do a fast motion on the drawing tablet, so this is a bit of a problem.  This is not an issue on photoshop.

I have an I7 7700k  (4.20 GHZ quadcore) processor and a gtx 1050 graphics card.  This is for the microsoft store version of affinity photo (desktop).  I have tried altering settings in the performance tab, but the default settings seem to be the fastest still.   

[Chris B]

Hey Estoc, welcome to the Affinity Forums.

Have you disabled Windows Ink from the tablet properties? Is it possible to get a quick screen recording too? 

[Estoc]

I just tried disabling Windows Ink and it doesn't seem to have affected anything.  In the video below, the first stroke is a slow stroke with no lag, the second stroke is done fast with a lot of lag.

[Chris B]

Hey Estoc,

I can see the lag but could you clarify the following:

1. What size is your document?
2. Which brush are you using?
3. What size is the brush?

The bigger your brush gets, the slower it will draw. However, this is being worked on and should improve. As a temporary workaround, can you try reducing the brush spacing slightly as this could make a big difference. 

[Estoc]

1.  The size of the document is 3000x5200 pixels, [I also tried this with a smaller document size and nothing changed]
2.  the brush I am using is a custom made brush,
3.  the size of the brush is about 300 px.

I tried adjusting the brush spacing slightly and there was a big jump in performance.  It also seems adding textures to the brushes significantly slows down the brush strokes, so it seems I will have to change a lot of my brushes and do without textures.  Does the file size of the textures alter performance? 

It is good to hear that this is being worked on; do you know how soon improvements will be implemented?  It kind of sucks having to alter my brushes, the spacing can make some of them look off.

Edited December 4, 2019 by Estoc

[Chris B]

Hey Estoc,

It probably has more to do with the brush size and its settings. All the brushes that come with the app go through a proper testing process so we can optimise them for performance and quality. If you're making a custom brush, it won't have been tested so you will need to tweak it but it sounds like you've already cracked it.

The file size of the texture will have a great impact on the performance too.

I'm not too sure, to be honest. We essentially need to implement something similar for Windows that we have for macOS (Metal Compute) that can drastically speed up the performance of raster brushes.