Paintstormstudio.com

Hi!

I bought Paintstorm yesterday, and must say it is a fantastic tool! I am an artist ( http://www.artstax.dk ) who uses both digital and analogue media, and Paintstorm is far better than any of my other painting/drawing software to emulate the feel of analogue media. Wonderfull!

But now to my problem.

Paintstorm uses excessively much CPU power, also when not drawing or doing anything in the program. The CPU consumption rates a constant 50 % from the moment the program is started, and soon after I can hear the fans in the computer speeding up as the cpu is heating.
Strangely, the moment I make another window active (Paintstorm no longer being the active window, but still running) the CPU consumption drops dramatically.
None of my other graphics software has this behaviour.

About my computer:
HP G5321sc with Pentium dualcore @ 3.20ghz
4 gb memory
64bit win 7 sp1
Graphic card: nVidia Geforce GT 630 CUDA
Input unit: Wacom Intouos 4

Help anybody?

Strangely, the moment I make another window active (Paintstorm no longer being the active window, but still running) the CPU consumption drops dramatically.

It's not the strange. It's special function to release CPU if window not active.
What about big CPU load - it's normal, because you have not very strong processor. Paintstorm have the same engine as a modern video game, for example if the games like Call of duty or Crisys shows 10 FPS at the low settings, paintstorm can works slow too.

I understand that Paintstorm, when painting, needs to use the nescessary CPU, but I think it is very unpractical that it uses that power even when NOT doing anything. Even if it doesnt receive any input from the Wacom, it races along, gulping up CPU. Why and for what does Paintstorm use 50% CPU power when it isn't doing anything??
I have tried monitoring both Corel Painter, Krita, Art Rage and Clip Studio Paint and NONE of those apps uses CPU the agressive way PaintStorm does. And those applications are modern and powerfull too...

For my PC it's only 12% of CPU... And if you are drawing you always move cursor above the window and the program must works at that time.

These pictures speaks for themselves:

Paintstorm CPU use:



Corel Painter 12 CPU use:

PaintStorm does use a decent amount of the CPU regularly.

When I draw (2500x2500 canvas) it will gulp around 30% of my CPU when not being utilized. (Haswell I5 Quad 3.4 Ghz)

Photoshop will use around 25% of CPU only when drawing. (same size canvas)

I just thought it was interesting. I like to stream on Picarto a lot using OBS, and I did notice a performance hit compared to using Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint.

I just figured PaintStorm is newer, so it hasn't had time to flesh it all out yet.

All the best,

Armor

OK, we'll add little pause to drawing function, now it's works without any delay, maybe it's make calculations faster then needed.

Another solution I've found, specially since my CPU shows no peaks but the software still lags sometimes when painting is to Select/copy a small portion of the canvas, like 10px or so, this seems to free up some memory and cpu.

Don't know exactly what it does but it helps a lot to reduce or remove the lag.