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Paintstorm big battery drain when idle

Posted: Mon May 01, 2017 8:18 am
by JoseConseco
My 2in1 dell laptop battery is loosing power fast when painting in PSS even with small brushes. For example simple pencil sketching with PSS - battery status shows me 1,5hour battery left. After switching to CLIP STUDIO PAINT predicted battery life goes up to 2,5hours (meaning battery consumption mus have gone down a lot).
PSS seems more fluid and responsive that any other app (krita, csp, medibang etc), but it is also most power hungry (exept Rebelle paint app - with fluid sim it is draining battery even faster than PSS). Is there a way to fix it? Again even with small simple brush (10-15 pixel size, blur setting set to 0, color extend - 0, brush uses texture mask) battery life goes down fast.

Re: Paintstorm big battery drain when painting.

Posted: Mon May 01, 2017 2:50 pm
by Cosmic_Logan
Paintstorm seems to still use CPU when not doing brush strokes. I'm guessing it repaints the screen aggressively even while idle or some other update to do with canvas since it still uses the CPU even when application is minimized. The larger the canvas, the more CPU is used.

Re: Paintstorm big battery drain when painting.

Posted: Mon May 01, 2017 4:15 pm
by ArmorWraith
Paintstorm is probably more GPU intensive than most other painting software, that is why there is such a huge performance difference. I doubt much could be done, as it would be similar to trying to optimize a video game for less power consumption, which would in some manner affect the quality or speed of the rendering.

Have you thought about buying a second battery for your laptop model? I know a couple gamers who always keep a spare charged for longer excursions.

all the best,

Armor

Re: Paintstorm big battery drain when painting.

Posted: Mon May 01, 2017 9:39 pm
by JoseConseco
PSS brush blending is very fast - probably have best quality to speed ratio (it is bit hard to create 1to1 comparison with exactly same settings between apps). But opposite is true for simple brushes (with no blending). Both CSP and Krita seems to be faster with simple round opacity brushes.
GPU load from GPU-z:
PSS - 60-70% GPU usage when doing nothing!!!, and stays same when Painting
CSP - 5% and dont increase to much when painting - seems it it not using GPU for drawing.
Krita - 5% idle, goes to 65% when painting
MediBang - 5%dile, 9% when painting.
So the problems seems to be big gpu usage by PSS, even if I'm doing nothing (it dosen't go down even if I minimize PSS window). Tested on win10 64bit, and Dell laptop. Can't test on pc this week. Hope somebody else can confirm this.

Re: Paintstorm big battery drain when painting.

Posted: Wed May 03, 2017 1:07 pm
by support
Different engines, you have to put up with it. Paintstorm is more demanding on GPU

Re: Paintstorm big battery drain when painting.

Posted: Thu May 04, 2017 1:27 pm
by JoseConseco
Just to be clear I was speaking about big GPU load (60-70%) while not painting - or alt_tabbing switching to different app. I don't get why UI drawing takes so much resources.
I also noticed that some popups in PSS makes gpu load go down to 0 - eg. Help->check for updates.