I have a question: what’s the worst GPU/integrated graphics that can run Krita under 4K on an A3 300ppi document, without any brush/canvas slowdowns?
I have read the old threads about GPU recommendations. The conclusion back then, was that GPU matters the least. But the situation has changed, as more and more pen displays now have 4K resolution.
I remember when I first used a 4K pen display, the cheaper GPUs I had just couldn’t cut it.
I had a FirePro V4900 (Radeon HD 6570 equivalent, 1GB VRAM, from 2011), and it was absolutely struggling, even when paired with an Intel i9-9900K with 64GB of RAM.
I had also tried to run Krita on an i5-8250U laptop (UHD620 iGPU, 8GB RAM), output to 4K via thunderbolt, and it had noticeable slowdowns too.
To avoid slowdown, I have been using a half-decent discrete GPU in my office (Radeon Pro WX5100, a lesser RX570, but with 8GB VRAM).
Thing became interesting when my organization recently bought some new PCs with Intel i5-12500 CPU (UHD770 iGPU), 2x8GB DDR4-3200 RAMs. Although it was a huge downgrade on the GPU side (the chassis cannot support a discrete GPU), I was pleasantly surprised by how well Krita works on this system – there were no as much noticeable canvas slowdowns on a 4K pen display, compared to its predecessors.
UHD770 isn’t a powerful GPU by any means. Its performance is way worse than crappy dGPUs like RX550.
So I wonder what is Krita’s bottom-line GPU requirement for 4K display (A3 300 PPI document) without canvas/brush slowdowns? I think by answering trhis question, we can help a lot of users save money on their PCs.
2022-12-14 Edit
I have done some investigation lately, but since the post cannot be edited, I will edit the original post for anyone one might stumble upon this post.
I used radeontop to monitor GPU and VRAM usage this time. For a Radeon Pro WX5100 (Polaris 10 from 2016, a lesser RX 570), single 4K 60Hz, color-managed display:
- KDE Plasma consumes about 500MB of VRAM by default at system start.
- Krita consumes about 1GB of VRAM when opening up a sRGB 8bit 10000x5000 20 layers document.
- If nothing else happens, the combination of 1+2 will consume less than 2GB of VRAM, which most modern integrated graphics can handle without much issue.
- Opening Firefox, Chromium, video playback and such (a casual usecase, I assume) will bump VRAM usage above 5GB. In many cases, the used VRAMs won’t be released even after exiting those apps, probably due to memory leak.
- Krita’s GPU usage can reach 80% during intense usage (fullscreen, smooth canvas zooming/rotation big brush, quick strokes).
- An iGPU from 2022 like UHD770 has noticeable slowdowns during intense GPU usage spikes, it doesn’t make it unusable, but it was not a nice experience.
As such, I think we should recommend people to use GPUs with 6GB of VRAM and above, if they plan to use Krita with 4K displays. Otherwise, they will have to close everything else in order to save enough VRAM for Krita. Integrated graphics from 2022 could not provide the GPU processing power to unleash Krita’s full potential under 4K. But any dedicated GPUs from 2022 will do.
FYI, the reference GPU I used – Radeon Pro WX5100 is slower than RX 6400 in general, which is the bottom of the barrel in 2022. On paper spec, Intel ARC A380 6GB can barely meet the requirement as well.