Re: [Gimp-user] speeding up gimp

[Casey Connor <gimp-user-list caseyconnor org>]

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