I've asked this before, with no answers. My aim, as a happy Gimp user, is not to slate the software, but to improve it. I am not a developer, but rather a digital artist who uses Gimp extensively.

Working on large canvases, I see that Gimp slows down, where rendering is concerned. For example, if I have a complex artwork and I want to hide certain layers, then a simple click on the eye icon in the layer takes a lot longer than it should. As much as developers hate comparisons, this simple task is generally quicker in Photoshop.

Another obvious "problem" is that, again, on a large canvas (A4 and up, 300DPI), the brushes - when increased in scale - lag behind the mouse / stylus. This indicates to me that Gimp's rendering engine could be quicker. Again, I've compared the exact same task in Photoshop (CS3) and it is considerably quicker (even with less RAM) allocated to it.

Speaking of which, I am using an i7 PC with 3 gigs of RAM allocated to Gimp alone, so I'm not sure how to make Gimp's response time any quicker.

Will the next release of Gimp be a bit quicker? And what tips can anyone give?

This is good to hear. Rendering speed is important, especially if Gimp wants to be a viable competitor to the mainstream counterparts, where man-sized canvasses are concerned.

On 03/02/2011 03:18, Joao S. O. Bueno wrote:

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 3:20 PM, Martin Nordholts wrote:

On 02/02/2011 02:32 PM, Jeremy Nell wrote:

Will the next release of Gimp be a bit quicker?

I'm afraid not; the next release of GIMP, GIMP 2.8, will not be quicker in this regard.

The release after that, GIMP 3.0, will focus on running on GTK 3.0 and bringing high bit depths into the picture.

3.2 will focus on non-destructiveness

Maybe in 3.4 we'll have time to solve this in a proper way.

Actually, this may well be solved for GIMP 3.0 - as it will them most depend on GEGL improvements.
Pippin has detailed the improvements that could be done on GEGL with regards to speed rendering in a document he posted on Tuesday (I don't remember if it was to this list):
mostly improvements that would allow the image viewport to be real time rendered, while the real rendering would happen in background.

js ->

/ Martin

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I currently have 6 gigs of DDR3 RAM in my PC. I increased Gimp's tile-cache size to 3 gigs, and left "number of processors" at 8 (as well as everything else).

On 04/02/2011 00:28, Sven Neumann wrote:

On Wed, 2011-02-02 at 15:32 +0200, Jeremy Nell wrote:

Speaking of which, I am using an i7 PC with 3 gigs of RAM allocated to Gimp alone, so I'm not sure how to make Gimp's response time any quicker.

What exactly do you mean when you say that you allocated 3 gigs of RAM to GIMP? Did you increase the tile-cache size in GIMP to 3 GB or do you just have 3 GB of RAM that GIMP could use if you allowed it to do that (by increasing the tile-cache size appropriately)?

Just asking to make sure that there isn't a misunderstanding...

Sven