Forced VSync on Intel iGPU when using DirectX11 on Windows

Hi.

First of all, thank you very much to all people involved with Krita. I’ve been using the software as a hobbyist almost everyday for the past four and a half years and I’ve got no intention of it being any other way.

I almost exclusively use the program on a desktop PC, but I’ve recently bought a small tablet PC with an Intel iGPU (UHD Graphics 620) and wanted to also use Krita 5.2.2 on this machine. As it turns out, things that seem so obvious and simple as forcing VSync off in order to reduce drawing latency, are certainly not easy whatsoever when you get into the integrated GPU and laptop world, and that’s exactly my situation.

Apparently, these low power Intel iGPUs have no control whatsoever over VSync through its extremely limited control panel, and the driver apparently forces VSync by default on DX11, so the situation is as follows:

  • -OpenGL: Terrible performance, but VSync is apparently off, so the framerate can go as fast as the tiny GPU can pump frames out, both on “standard” and “canvas only” modes.

  • -DirectX11: Slightly less terrible performance, but always locked to a maximum of 60 FPS (60 Hz display), in both standard and canvas only modes.

It’s not like the GPU can’t possibly run without VSync on DX11 (it has no problem running DX11 games without VSync as fast as it can), so I would like to know if there’s any way to actually force VSync off on Krita when using DX11, in order to reduce the latency as much as the hardware would allow.
It’s OK if I have to modify the code and recompile the program, but ideally it would be something a little bit more user friendly. I’ve not found any option related to this either in the GUI or in the configuration file (the “disableVSync” option on the “kritarc” file does nothing when using DX11 on this GPU), so I thought the next best thing to do would be asking here.

Sorry for the wall of text, and again: thank you to all of you.

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Welp… some news.

Just installed Windows 10 on an external drive, same drivers, same Krita configuration etc., just to check if it was all just some Win11 nonsense going on, and yeah, it seems like it was exactly like that.

For whatever reason Win11 just decides to force VSync and limit the framerate in Krita’s main window, and it may actually have nothing to do with the GPU at all. On Win10 I’m running the canvas on the default view, with DX11, at hundreds of frames per second (not on fullscreen though, for that you seemed to always need a working GPU driver control panel, which Intel doesn’t have for these GPUs).

So… I don’t know if the developers are already aware of this behaviour on Windows 11, but for me at this point I might just as well nuke the entire drive and start all over with Windows 10.

Found the issue, it was the MPO thing all along.

Is the Krita team already aware of this, can they even do anything about it or it’s just on GPU vendors side?

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