Computer specs

[Anonymous No.3900276]

What kind of spec do you need for a computer to work on a very high res, say 6k x 8k resolution? I'm using a laptop with i5 7200U and 940MX and it's struggling to run anything beyond 3k x 4k res on Krita. I was wondering if I should build a PC with the Ryzen 5 so I could work on a higher res without lagging.

Also it would be nice if you could post your PC specs and the resolution you're working on as well along with your art program.

[Anonymous No.3900291]

It's probably Krita fault. I remember having a problem with editing just images in it.
I have i3 8100, 8gb ram and gtx 1050ti. I'm working in photoshop in res 5400x9600 pixels

[Anonymous No.3900311]

>>3900276
Maybe try enabling the settings in pic related and see if you can see a difference in performance. I personally use a custom built pc with Ryzen 5 1600 on my desktop and have no problems painting in Krita in 4500x4000 which is the resolution I usually use.

I'll try to use if I can upload a webm testing the performance of Krita in that resolution on my ryzen pc. But I think the programs that perform the best in that resolution are those lightweight japanese painting programs like Paint Tool Sai and Medibang.

[Anonymous No.3900312]

Yeah, sounds like krita. I'm on a 10 year old laptop and still manage to work 6k without much lag in PS and CSP as long as I dont use big brushes.

Ideally, you want massive single core performance because all these programs are shit, a ton of ram, and at least a Quadro 600. But that's beast workstation tier.

[Anonymous No.3900314]

>>3900276
I work at A4 600DPI with a bunch of layers, my computer is a 10 years old laptop and can handle it. It's slow as hell when processing stuff and very complex brushes lag too much to be usable, but I can work comfortably enough.

[Anonymous No.3900315]

>>3900314
Oh and I forgot to say that I use CSP, on Windows 7 64x

[Anonymous No.3900322]

>>3900276
Anyone knows how to enable SLI on PS?
I have high spec but PS still has lag with some textures brushes somehow
wtf

[Anonymous No.3900327]

>>3900322
are you working on win10?

[Anonymous No.3900347]

>>3900327
yes

[Anonymous No.3900352]

>>3900347
Make an txt file named PSUserConfig and paste it in. Drop it in %appdata% in photoshop settings.
# Use WinTab
UseSystemStylus 0

# Use Legacy Healing Brush
LegacyHealingBrush 1

# Disable Scratch Compression for fast HDD
VMCompressionPages 0

# Use Overscrolling
OverscrollingAlways 2

[Anonymous No.3900356]

>>3900352
photoshop settings folder*

[Anonymous No.3900359]

>>3900352
I knew about wintab but what do the other things do?

[Anonymous No.3900360]

>>3900352
Computer illiterate here, thanks will try tomorrow when I wake up. Hope it doesn't break my pirated PS version kek

[Anonymous No.3900362]

I'll ask this here now that the topic has surfaced... Are "high end" laptops worth it in 2019? I'm not tech savvy, but I've always heard that desktops are better in terms of customization and performance, but at the same time I've heard high end laptops have come a long way in the last years... Space is more of a factor than it being portable, so I'd like to know what would be the best long term choice. Budget is not that much of a problem.

[Anonymous No.3900372]

>>3900362
Onboard graphics are better and good enough to run an attached monitor. All your space concerns go to shit when you start adding quality of life features like a keyboard, 4k or at least 1440 monitor in la decent size, tablet, and a computer with enough ports to handle all of that. May as well build a decent computer for less.

I can work on an iPad pro but painting and editing on a laptop with a tablet attached is shitty. I know people who do it but I don't know how they do it.

[Anonymous No.3900552]

>>3900311
OP here, I activated the ANGLE Direct3D and it seems to be smoother than before, thanks. Although I should totally try another program once I'm free.

[Anonymous No.3900578]

>>3900276
Why do you need to work on files that large?

[Anonymous No.3900594]

>>3900312
Photoshop uses more than one core, I dimly recall that you get diminishing returns after 6, however. But that's not the only issue for a resource hog like Photoshop - I love PS but it is a hog.

The issues to consider for PS is: processor, RAM, video card, and scratch disk. Large files will swamp all 4, easily.

I've found most people are clueless about scratch disks. PS, or any Adobe app, stores a shit ton of data on the fly, for history/undo. Adobe's approach - and this is from Adobe engineers - is they always try to make things non-destructive/recoverable, so they store things temporarily to the scratch disk constantly.

Rule of thumb, according to them, is minimum 3x the biggest file size you commonly work on, or combined size of all files, if you often have multiple open, save often, and make sure the scratch disk is a dedicated partition or drive that your OS and app aren't on, or used by anything else. Your OS, Mac or Windows, is hitting the disk hard as it is with paging, caching and all kinds of shit like that, moving PS's off the boot drive is crucial for best performance. SSD if you can, fastest physical drive you can get, otherwise.

I work in the Creative Suite with all applications constantly, so I have a dedicated second small SSD in my Windows laptop just for the scratch disks for Photoshop and Illustrator and the rest. Default for PS is using the disk the app is on, and it's just a bottleneck, fighting for access time with the OS and browsers.

If you can't, turn the history settings down low, don't build huge numbers of layers, save often, and go into Preferences/Performance and set it to "basic" - and don't use smoothing on brushes.

[Anonymous No.3900751]

>>3900276
Krita in general is shit
It also generally depends on the brushes and the size of them, anon.

https://www.clipstudio.net/en/purchase/trial
Open the same settings in that and it'll work much better.

A fucking 10k X 10k on my Samsung Tab S4 in Autodesk Sketchbook loads fine - it loads fine on my Note 8 phone too
Has no support for more than 4 layers, though

Anon, it's literally just the software - try CSP as I posted. Or even Medibang paint

[Anonymous No.3900753]

>>3900578
I want to join some competition but many of them requires file bigger than what I'm usually working on. Also with my current workflow a higher res should help making the work cleaner

[Anonymous No.3900770]

>>3900594
do I need scratch disk for medibang? can it even do that? Medibang works fine for me but I want to know if an small SSD will give me room for more, make it faster, or simply require less upgrades.

[Anonymous No.3900788]

>ryzen 5

At least go with ryzen threadripper you fucking poor moron, or just go back to traditional, i doubt your art is worth the hardware upgrade

[Anonymous No.3900859]

>>3900594
That's all extremely useful to know, good post. I think I had single core performance confused with performance per core, a lot of other programs and older versions of Photoshop either use one core or weren't programmed to take advantage of more, smaller cores and you get better results out of fewer, faster cores. It's not quite "running old games designed for an overclocked Pentium 4" bad, but it's something to consider in a build that would probably save money.

I can't believe I forgot about the scratch disk and swap space. I guess it's because I've been doing that forever for other reasons. I have more trouble with how RAM hungry programs and the OS are, browsers eat that shit. 8 gigs aren't enough when you're editing photos and running a couple background apps and tabs.

I've been pricing a workstation build and this made me reconsider the drive layout and what it's going to take. I'm going to have to rebudget and rethink some specs.

[Anonymous No.3900974]

>>3900352
What am I in for senpai? I usually don't tweak my programms

[Anonymous No.3901001]

>>3900751
I am not that anon but on my machine (4k monitor, 2700x and Vega64) CSP runs like ficking shit.

I wouldn't recommend CSP to anyone based on my experience.
>Move cursor
>It seems to update at 30fps and cursor becomes almost invisible due to screen ghosting/smearing
>Do anything
>Canvas updates tile by tile
>Select something and move/deform it
>Cant see it while transforming
>Move or rotate canvas
>Massive screen tearing

Stop shillings your broken garbage, Krita is objectively superior in performance and features

[Anonymous No.3901008]

>>3901001
Anon, you don't know much about computers if you think all you listed is helpful.
Name resolution, ppi, ram etc
Also what tablet?

Also I didn't shill - but the fact you honestly think that Krita, which lacks features, has more features makes me think you're a foss fag so g'luck

[Anonymous No.3901009]

>>3900788
go jew somewhere else you nigger

[Anonymous No.3901011]

>>3901008
by the way anon described his pc it must be a prebuild

[Anonymous No.3901050]

>>3901008
>>3901011
>CSP literally has no v-sync or anything to prevent fucking screen tearing
>resolution, ppi, ram etc Also what tablet?

Any resolution.
PPI? my monitor is roughly 140ppi, why even ask?
ram - 16gb ddr4 3466Mhz
Tablet - Deco01

And neither of those things has anything to do with CSP not having v-sync

[Anonymous No.3901053]

>>3901050
>Any resolution

Yeah we're done here - OP, try the trial. As explained, Krita is shit on Windows.

[Anonymous No.3901057]

>>3901053
>>3901011
>>3901008

You're just a buttblasted shill lol.
As for Krita - on my hardware it runs butter smooth, tried it on linux, didn't notice significant difference.
As opposed to CSP that just doesn't work.
>move cursor
>it becomes invisible
Yeah no

[Anonymous No.3901064]

>>3901057
>>move cursor
>>it becomes invisible
>Yeah no
another anon here, on one of my 2 pc it does that frequently, on the other I have no probles. So I end up not using on neither, because I dont want to start a file on one, and when i am at the other realize I cant finish it. The one on which it works its a newer pc, buts its actually weaker performance wise.

[Anonymous No.3901088]

>>3900276
I also have a Ryzen 5 with 16gb ram. Had the same issue with CSP, I turned off the auto save feature and my problem was solved, it runs super smoothly now. I don't know if there's something similar on Krita though.

[Anonymous No.3901157]

>>3900594
Wouldn't having a scratch disk on an ssd eat up operational life with the constant writing PS would be doing?

[Anonymous No.3903528]

>>3901157
Some are better designed for it. If you need something like a scratch disk, one breaking every couple years makes for a good tax write off.

[Anonymous No.3903548]

>>3903528
>>3901157
I still have my OCZ Vertex 3 that i got like 7 years ago as my main drive.

SSDs are a lot more reliable than most paranoids think. Just because it will certainly fail once you rewrite it like 100 000 times entirely or so doesn't mean it's gonna be a short time.

[Anonymous No.3903569]

>>3900276
8k resolution is 7680 × 4320. Thats basically the a4 at 300 dpi. Is not high res at all.

And yes, a ryzen 2600x is overkill for that shit. You can add a cheap 570 rx if you want too.

[Anonymous No.3903827]

>>3903569
I suppose anon means 8k by 8k canvas size and my old system (2500k and 8gb of ddr3) begun to struggle real hard at resolutions like 4000*12000 but adding up to 16 gb of RAM helped that.

[Anonymous No.3904200]

>>3900276
Krita is crap. Use a real software.
And 2D work takes very little out of your computer compared to video/audio editing, gaming and 3D. Improving to i7 will do much more for you than improving your gpu.

[Anonymous No.3905116]

>>3900276
my shitty i5 laptop can barely draw at 400dpi a4 resolution.. it gets pretty laggy fast

[Anonymous No.3905219]

6700k and a 1080 and Krita is choppy for me with 3kx3k resolution. So I just use Photoshop

[Anonymous No.3905565]

working in dpi

[Anonymous No.3906399]

>>3903569
what is high res? what does the pros work at?

[Anonymous No.3907218]

>>3906399
Print demands 600+ dpi for certain applications. Some projects need 36k pixels on a side, 20k isn't unreasonable. These tend to be specialist cases with high resolution prints that need a lot of headroom for being downscaled. It really depends on the application.

High res in general would be formatted to reach a target of fullscreen on the current average highest resolution monitors. That would be the minimum resolution, may as well double that to account for crops and scaling.

[Anonymous No.3907911]

>>3900276
Core i7 860
8 gigs RAM
GTX 760
Working on 6k x 4k canvas usually. Photoshop. Works fine although having browser with lots of tabs and some podcast opened at the same time might cause severe lagging if I have lots of layers.
Soon upgrading to R5 2600x, RTX 2070, 16 gigs RAM.

[Anonymous No.3907983]

>>3907218
>Print demands 600+ dpi for certain applications.
Ink jet, mostly. Offset and web printing are different technologies, and the rule of thumb is 2x the intended LPI of the press/plates.

Most large format inkjets don't need more than 300dpi @ full printing size, as the RIPs upscale the images to the required printing resolution - the really big stuff, like busses and billboards, same.
There are very few print applications where the pixel dimensions will be the same as the printing resolution, it's two different things.

[Anonymous No.3907987]

>>3901157
Not significantly. I didn't buy a top of the line one, you can get one that will work perfectly for $50.
If you want to get a fast physical drive, that's fine, too. I used them for years. But smaller SSDs are cheap, why not?

[Anonymous No.3907993]

>>3906399
Depends on the intent. If it's offset printing, like a book or album cover, best case is 2x the final print size, at 300dpi.

I usually work at the same sizes I do painting and drawing, like 11x17" @ 600dpi, for something I'm just doing for no reason. For clients, I determine the size according to the final output the client wants.

One thing a lot of beginners don't know, is that below a certain magnification, it's not going to show on the printed page. I used to work professionally editing and cleaning art scans of paintings for printing as posters. We scanned them at 1.5/2x the final printed size, at 300dpi, and working on them, anything below 200% magnification is wasted effort, because it won't show up on the press. It's not a perfect pixel - printed dot match.

For beginning work, 300dpi at a reasonable page size where the brush strokes aren't too big or too small is fine. Then save a final jpeg with no layers at a display size and resolution, and store the layered file.

In other words, don't work on a file so big you need a 400 pixel brush to do pencil lines, and don't work so small that you get pixelation.

[Anonymous No.3908038]

>>3907993
thanks for the insight
Any reason you work casually at 600dpi? If I remember what I read correctly dpi only matters when printing right?

Also is there any difference in the outcome between a work you painted at 11x17/600 and one at 22x34/600 then reduced by 50%?

I recently switched to digital and I got told to work big so my lineart would come better and cleaner once I reduce it by 50%

[Anonymous No.3908074]

>>3908038
>Any reason you work casually at 600dpi?

Because it's less destructive to scale down, than up. Scaling down removes pixels, scaling up inserts them - it can do bad things to color. Plus, downsampling will tighten up an image, it's a form of sharpening. Upscaling is a form of blurring, because it interpolates neighboring pixels to fill in the blanks.

>If I remember what I read correctly dpi only matters when printing right
Kind of - close enough for general purposes. Commercial printing (offset) it's LPI. File resolution is PPI (pixels per inch), inkjet and other output devices is generally DPI, although inkjet isn't a 1:1 translation, either. If your inkjet's native resolution is 4800 dpi, that doesn't mean you need a file at that dpi, it just means it will make really subtle gradations and transitions from a 300 dpi file.

I think the best way to look at is this: give yourself enough PPI in the file to get the work done, without it being utter overkill, most printers will throw out what it doesn't need when you hit print - just meet or exceed slightly the minimums.

>Also is there any difference in the outcome between a work you painted at 11x17/600 and one at 22x34/600 then reduced by 50%?

See above. Plus, in printing, downscaling will muddy up the midtones, it was our standard to bump the mids at about 4% when downscaling at 50%. And, you might need to blur a TOUCH if it oversharpens.

>I recently switched to digital and I got told to work big so my lineart would come better and cleaner once I reduce it by 50%

Excellent advice - and work in greyscale, to reduce file size. That's a different issue, because you won't get color shifts, the line work will tighten up and smooth better because the app has more data to work with.

Cartoonists, when they used to do actual line art, would work at twice the printing size, for exactly that purpose. I think the guy who drew Bloom County worked at 4x the printed size, for the typical newspaper format.

[Anonymous No.3908085]

Can you anime shitters please explain how printing resolutions are relevant to you?

[Anonymous No.3908099]

>>3908074
Nice, thanks again anon, I was completly clueless about this topic before this thread

[Anonymous No.3908138]

>>3900276
>windows 8.1
>intel core i7-4790 3.60 Ghz
>16GB RAM
>GTX 760
I work on A3 documents just fine

[Anonymous No.3908211]

>>3907983
I wasn't sure about some of that because I'm more used to photography and making prints. The similarities with crops and downscaling concerns are close enough that I think this anecdote applies to digital art as well.

One of the harder parts of photography is letting go of the the math and theory and learning how to work in the laziest way possible. A good print doesn't need a high megapixel camera and the amount of enlargement you can get away with due to intended viewing distance is kind of disgusting. The real reasons for high res files are that even the best lenses drop your observable resolution by .8x so you have to downscale to sharpen, crops eat resolution like crazy and they're usually intentional, and it's easier to throw money at the cheapest part of a problem and make yourself able to fix things later faster. Hell, a simple rotation adjustment in post can eat a quarter of your frame but fiddling with your ball joint takes 10 times as long in the field because all tripods are shit.

I'm bringing all this up because things should be done for a reason and many of the concerns are the same. It's better to work as large as you can afford to than limit yourself and have to fight your way around a problem down the road. It sounds obvious until you're trying to salvage the one good part of an image and end up with an 800x600. The only caveat to this is exponential cost scaling beyond a certain size and diminished returns due to lack of need.

[Anonymous No.3908214]

>>3908085
Conventions?

[Anonymous No.3908218]

>>3900276
>Krita
Found your problem chief.