I've just got a new laptop and installed the new 1.2 version of inkscape on it and I'm finding it almost unusable as it's so so slow and laggy in zooming, panning, moving things... trying to do anything is painful. Is anyone else finding this or is there anything I can do to improve things?
It's on windows 11, Ryzen 5 brand new Dell laptop. Considering installing an earlier version of inkscape again as this is slowing down my work so much but don't know if that would help or if there's a better solution...?
Is there any kind of general “performance hierarchy” or “performance trade-off rankings” for the myriad of render settings? My work lately is just wireframe material, often done by hand-tracing bitmaps placed underneath), and the performance at high zoom levels is truly appalling in recent builds.
Like with Clare, turning off dithering certainly helps a lot, but it’s still hardly smooth at high zoom levels. (There is another weird bug, in Windows 10, where panning sometimes picks up pieces of the window below and incorporates it into the Inkscape canvas content. Could be an NVIDIA bug — I have seen some shocking problems that suggest that the entire OS rendering stack is far more vulnerable to abuse than it should be, like Inkscape bugs that overwrote part of the taskbar with garbage, but maybe these are video driver faults.)
It’s impossible to guess what any of the many knobs and dials in the rendering settings actually do, and nothing I fiddled with until today had any effect at all!
(Note for reference, this is a Core i7-10700 + GeForce GT 730 — nothing fancy, should be enough for some simple wireframe shapes, no filters, no effects, just lines!)
If working with wireframes/paths, I'd try View>Display mode>Outlines. That will not display any fills or strokes, but may provide the performance expected.
Outline is blindingly fast, but it removes things like colour cues and, of course, the underlying bitmap work material. I use outline mode during clean-up to make sure all my lines meet where they should. The objective is to minimise the general lag — the note on wireframe work was more a way to indicate that the amount of calculation required is very small (no gradients, blurs, effects). Panning lag is weird, because you would expect it to have cached the tiles but it doesn’t: panning back and forth shows no clear sign of caching. The lag is generally proportional to zoom level: I tend to end up around 500–1000% zoom.
The troubling thing is that the default settings are set to “slow”.
Dithering I assume is the attempt to overcome the limitations of 24-bit colour, a setting that somehow I overlooked. However, since I am only using solid lines with no gradients, there is nothing to dither. I guess that there is some missed optimisation to not waste CPU cycles trying to dither anything that is not a gradient fill or an effect (i.e. anything that is mathematically capable of generating shades in between RGB’s 8 bits/channel).
I decided not to file a bug report yet as I am not clear what is going wrong. The lag is so painful, I can’t understand why it seems as though most people never notice it. Clearly it’s not just me. Switching off dithering does seem to bring the speed back up to usable again, although it’s not fully cured the bug where zooming randomly leaps to the wrong part of the image, something I took to be lag-induced (interpreting the zoom request when the cursor has already moved elsewhere).
First one: it’s not bitmapped images that cause it, but use of bitmaps prevents using entirely outline view. Second one: I don’t even have an OpenGL option to enable. Third one: not proven to exist outside of macOS.
Not a lot to go on, which is what confuses me. This is the dithering bug:
My issue with this new crappy setup is that they removed any visual way of setting how the display settings are accessed so that you can't switch between default, custom and wide. I prefer the display setup like we had back before 1.0 and would love to be able to set my display to those settings that come from the "Default" setting for the software. It seems to me that the more they mess with it the worse they make it instead of better.
Beyond the Basics 1.2 Newly Installed, so slow and laggy
Inkscape.org
I've just got a new laptop and installed the new 1.2 version of inkscape on it and I'm finding it almost unusable as it's so so slow and laggy in zooming, panning, moving things... trying to do anything is painful. Is anyone else finding this or is there anything I can do to improve things?
It's on windows 11, Ryzen 5 brand new Dell laptop. Considering installing an earlier version of inkscape again as this is slowing down my work so much but don't know if that would help or if there's a better solution...?
In Preferences>Rendering, I'd untick the checkbox for Dithering and see if that helps.
Thanks, I've done that now but am switching off for the day so will let you know if that helped! :)
Hey! That has helped a lot, thanks very much. Still a bit laggy at times but more just with bigger photos etc which is fine :)
Is there any kind of general “performance hierarchy” or “performance trade-off rankings” for the myriad of render settings? My work lately is just wireframe material, often done by hand-tracing bitmaps placed underneath), and the performance at high zoom levels is truly appalling in recent builds.
Like with Clare, turning off dithering certainly helps a lot, but it’s still hardly smooth at high zoom levels. (There is another weird bug, in Windows 10, where panning sometimes picks up pieces of the window below and incorporates it into the Inkscape canvas content. Could be an NVIDIA bug — I have seen some shocking problems that suggest that the entire OS rendering stack is far more vulnerable to abuse than it should be, like Inkscape bugs that overwrote part of the taskbar with garbage, but maybe these are video driver faults.)
It’s impossible to guess what any of the many knobs and dials in the rendering settings actually do, and nothing I fiddled with until today had any effect at all!
(Note for reference, this is a Core i7-10700 + GeForce GT 730 — nothing fancy, should be enough for some simple wireframe shapes, no filters, no effects, just lines!)
If working with wireframes/paths, I'd try View>Display mode>Outlines. That will not display any fills or strokes, but may provide the performance expected.
Outline is blindingly fast, but it removes things like colour cues and, of course, the underlying bitmap work material. I use outline mode during clean-up to make sure all my lines meet where they should. The objective is to minimise the general lag — the note on wireframe work was more a way to indicate that the amount of calculation required is very small (no gradients, blurs, effects). Panning lag is weird, because you would expect it to have cached the tiles but it doesn’t: panning back and forth shows no clear sign of caching. The lag is generally proportional to zoom level: I tend to end up around 500–1000% zoom.
The troubling thing is that the default settings are set to “slow”.
Dithering I assume is the attempt to overcome the limitations of 24-bit colour, a setting that somehow I overlooked. However, since I am only using solid lines with no gradients, there is nothing to dither. I guess that there is some missed optimisation to not waste CPU cycles trying to dither anything that is not a gradient fill or an effect (i.e. anything that is mathematically capable of generating shades in between RGB’s 8 bits/channel).
I decided not to file a bug report yet as I am not clear what is going wrong. The lag is so painful, I can’t understand why it seems as though most people never notice it. Clearly it’s not just me. Switching off dithering does seem to bring the speed back up to usable again, although it’s not fully cured the bug where zooming randomly leaps to the wrong part of the image, something I took to be lag-induced (interpreting the zoom request when the cursor has already moved elsewhere).
Maybe one of these: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/?search=lag%20zoom&sort=created_date&state=opened&first_page_size=20
First one: it’s not bitmapped images that cause it, but use of bitmaps prevents using entirely outline view.
Second one: I don’t even have an OpenGL option to enable.
Third one: not proven to exist outside of macOS.
Not a lot to go on, which is what confuses me. This is the dithering bug:
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/3875
Turning off dithering makes a big difference, but it’s not the only cause.
My issue with this new crappy setup is that they removed any visual way of setting how the display settings are accessed so that you can't switch between default, custom and wide. I prefer the display setup like we had back before 1.0 and would love to be able to set my display to those settings that come from the "Default" setting for the software. It seems to me that the more they mess with it the worse they make it instead of better.
Widescreen is toggled in the view menu, as usual. Custom never worked (in my experience).
The persistent snapping bar is an option in version 1.3a.
Users are welcome to continue using 0.9.x versions.