I've been googling for info on making GIMP faster, and I think I have most of the bases covered (caches, SSD, RAM, etc.), but using large brushes on large images is still very slow.

I have an i7 4770K and am using Intel on-board graphics. Would getting a graphics card of some kind be likely to improve things? I can't seem to find clear info -- it sounds like the latest GIMPs support GPU acceleration, but I'm not clear on whether I'd see a difference with my hardware?

I'm using 2.9.5 (on Kubuntu).

Thanks for any tips.

-c

Thanks Joel --

I've been googling for info on making GIMP faster, and I think I have most of the bases covered (caches, SSD, RAM, etc.), but using large brushes on large images is still very slow.

Any reason you have to use such large brushes?

Except, I should ask first, how large to you mean?

Just convenience, I suppose -- I'm just doing photo editing, often in 16bit precision, with transparency, multiple layers, etc. The images are ~5100x3400, brushes around 770 pixel diameter. (I know it's a lot to ask of the program, and I'm not surprised that it's slow.)

This is when e.g. painting in shadows with a slow flow rate with the airbrush or paintbrush, or painting layer masks through complex selections (e.g. after making a series of luminosity masks and deriving selections from those). It's often nice to have big soft brushes to do this: small brushes would take way too much time. And more speed would help the brushes not be so stepped as I move them around.

I have an i7 4770K and am using Intel on-board graphics. Would getting a graphics card of some kind be likely to improve things? I can't seem to find clear info -- it sounds like the latest GIMPs support GPU acceleration, but I'm not clear on whether I'd see a difference with my hardware?

Depends on the card. Some cards are better supported by free software drivers than others, due in no small part to the manufacturers attitudes towards free software and towards good design.

Thanks -- I am aware of that dynamic. In the past I was looking at a used GTX 750 Ti or 950 for the sake of speeding up Blender, but some folks advised me that the speedup would be negligible at that price tier. I was just wondering how much the operations I was doing (described above) would actually be GPU-accelerated, and if they were, if the difference would be significant, given that I already had a reasonably recent CPU.

I'm using 2.9.5 (on Kubuntu).

KDE desktop? What other libraries?

Yes -- KDE. And sorry -- what sorts of libraries are you asking about? Currently it's a pretty vanilla installation (roughly equivalent to Ubuntu 16.10 with KDE); I am using the i915 Intel driver. Compositing is enabled (and disabling it has no effect on speed). GIMP is 2.9.5 commit a774b24 from otto-kesselgulasch PPA.

Thanks for the help, -c