Linux: poor UI performance

[mark9]

As a Linux user, I'm trialing AfterShotPro, and I'm excited by the potential. The tools are well thought through and and the image processing is fast.

But my ££ have remained in my wallet so far, for the same reason why I did not previously buy Bibble 5. The UI performance is terrible (unusable!) on my particular system. In particular, the crop tool has the ability to completely halt the UI.

Today I looked into it some more to investigate my theory that the QT toolkit is causing the slowdown with its use of XRender, something I have noticed with other QT applications (but not with such dramatic results). I seem to have hit on something just now; launching with:

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$ AfterShotPro -graphicssystem raster

and wow! Everything is responsive, and the software is usable.

My system is 32-bit with an older NVidia graphics (a 6800). But it works fine for every other GUI (eg. Opera, very fast). It seems like this could affect other users, particularly laptop users, so I wanted to post it here in case it makes the difference to others. Perhaps even worthy of investigation by the developers. Anyone else having troubles with UI performance?

[marceloanelli]

I am running opensuse 11.4 and same response with your options or without it. maube you must update qt libraries.

[greerd]

I am running opensuse 11.4 and same response with your options or without it. maube you must update qt libraries.

Same here, running Ubuntu 11.10

[FotoLars]

Hi!

Yes, that made a difference!
Cropping has always been slow in Bibble/ASP, in particular when using higher monitor resolutions.

Starting ASP with these parameters really speed cropping things up - at least with my NVIDIA Quadro NVS 295 card, running at 2X2560x1600.
The speed boost is at least 10-fold, no, rather 20-fold or more!

Thanks a lot for the tips!

This message should be moved to an upcoming Tips & Tricks section!


Cheers,

Lars
Lund, Sweden

[andreas]

Hm, I see no real difference here. But I'm on a i7-980 and everything is fast here. But its interesting to read. There have always been problems on some systems with the crop performance. So its a valuable hint.

@marceloanelli: It is totally unrelated what qt libs you installed. ASP uses the ones which ships with it.

Andreas

[marceloanelli]

That is a good policy....I am running desktop kernel 2.6.37.6-0.11 for opensus 11.4 with 2 mg ram, planning switch to pae kernel with 4 gb and no difference on rendering video.

[TexJoachim]

I don't see much difference.

Regards,

Joachim

[klaxian]

Amazing! That fix makes the UI usable finally. I was ready to give up once I tried to crop and everything pretty much froze. I have a powerful system so I didn't expect that. I suggest that the developers look into this issue as I'm sure we're not the only ones having this problem.

If it helps, I'm running Linux Mint 12 (derived from Ubuntu 11.10) with nvidia proprietary drivers, Gnome 3.2, 3 screens with Xinerama enabled, compositing disabled, kernel 3.2.

[ponto]

I can confirm that this option makes cropping usable. I am using the open source radeon driver.

[mark9]

I have a hunch that the slowness is proportional to the number of pixels involved; which could explain why the crop tool is most badly affected -- it requires drawing of vector graphics and masking to the majority of the screen.

But combined with my experiences with another QT app at work, it seems like maybe there's a correlation with (but not unique to) NVidia cards, or the proprietary driver? I don't have the hardware, but it might be worth comparing different brands of GPU in the same system.

Since others have confirmed this issue, on modern systems too, I've reported this to Corel via the SurveyMonkey link as a 'bug'.

[Zarastro]

Tried it here and now ASPro feels more snappy. Let's see if it also solves the UI update problems.

[LMB]

Very nice! Editing regions was the only thing that wasn't fast enough for my taste -- now it is running much smoother. Thanks for the tip!

[GoremanX]

This has made a dramatic difference in performance for me. I'm running opensuse 12.1 with the latest fglrx driver for a Radeon HD5750 video card. Previously, the interface was sluggish and painful to use. I figured it was just normal because Bibble behaved similarly in previous versions. But the raster option, everything is amazingly fast and responsive. Especially when working on multiple layers. This has finally made AfterShot fun to use on Linux.

[cookiebob]

I seem to have hit on something just now; launching with:

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$ AfterShotPro -graphicssystem raster

and wow! Everything is responsive, and the software is usable.

In heavy use, I clearly see a difference. Thank you for this little trick

[Blrfl]

If your X server has OpenGL (most do, see below), this will make it go a bit faster:

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AfterShotPro -graphicssystem opengl

Run this at the command line to check if you have OpenGL:

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xdpyinfo | fgrep -q GLX && echo "You have OpenGL." || echo "Sorry, no OpenGL."

--Mark