Krita is an increasing popular free and open-source graphics editor that many artists of various experience levels use as a viable alternative to Photoshop, InDesign, and other high-quality software that require monthly subscription payments. Unfortunately, a common issue Krita users have been noticing is that the program’s response speed has slowed significantly and lags frequently.

In this article, we’re going to list the top four most common reasons why Kritia might be lagging or uncommonly slow when you’re trying to create digital art and graphic designs. As you read, you’ll learn how to potentially resolve each cause in order to restore Krita to its optimal functionality.

1. The Application Needs to Be Reconfigured

If you’re an avid Krita user who has made countless works of art on this graphics editor and altered multiple settings, then the most likely cause for any lagging or reduced speed would be that the program needs to be reconfigured.

Reconfiguring Krita will allow you to reset or alter various settings that might be impeding the program’s overall functionality. Performing this process, along with restarting Krita, has been deemed the most effective solution for lag and speed issues by a significant number of Krita users.

To reconfigure Krita, you’ll need to open the program’s settings tab and select the “Configure Krita…” option. From here, you’ll click the “Display option” and then have select “Direct3D 11 via ANGLE” as your Preferred Renderer as opposed to the default “OpenGL.”

Many Krita users claim that this change alone can reduce lagging and increase response speed significantly, but some have found other settings selection can improve functionality even more. These additional changes include selecting “Bilinear Filtering” for your “Scaling Mode” and unchecking the “Use Texture Buffer” setting.

Once you’ve chosen your preferred settings, restart Krita and determine if this has resolved the issue.

2. Your Device Does Not Have Enough RAM

When a program isn’t working as well as you’d like or even at the same level is it used to, its easy to blame Krita itself for its reduced performance when, in reality, it could be your device causing the issue.

Graphics editors are typically very demanding softwares/programs that require significant amounts of available random access memory (RAM) on the host device in order for your laptop, computer, or tablet to support its tasks and save your artwork.

Therefore, if Krita worked flawlessly on a new device but its performance has seemed to go downhill lately with reduced speed and lagging, the reason might be that you need to add more memory in the form of RAM or cache.

As far as specifications are concerned, Krita requires its host device to have at least 4 GB of RAM, a GPU capable of opening OpenGL 3.0 or higher, and 300 MB or available storage space. If it doesn’t fulfill these requirements, it isn’t capable of running Krita to its fullest potential.

To determine if this is the root of your issue, open the “Settings” tab on Krita and then select “Configure Krita” and click the “Performance Check” option. This will show you specifications of Krita and you host device so you can determine if more RAM is necessary.

If RAM is insufficient, try increasing the RAM memory limit in the performance tab on Krista, upgrading your device’s RAM, or removing unnecessary default/startup programs or other downloaded programs you no longer use.

3. Your Canvas, Document, And/Or Brush Size is Too Large

Slow response times and lagging are common issues users have been reporting with Krita for years, even before its newest version was released.

The unfortunate reality of using a free graphics editor is that there is always a give and take somewhere as far as its capabilities are concerned, or else they would charge a monthly fee like the other top-of-the-line software. With Krita, the biggest limitation seems to be size-related.

It is common for Krita to lag or slow down once your document file size has become too large from multiple layers and features. Alternatively, the program seems to struggle when an uncommonly large canvas size has been selected or the artist is using one of the larger brush sizes.

For the most part, it would appear that the larger the tool, canvas, or file, the more Krita will lag and the slower it will be.

There are a wide variety of tools and canvas sizes to choose from on this program, so the easiest way to solve this issue is to either avoid using the larger options entirely, or reduce them when possible. Canvas size is the tricker fix of the two but can usually be decreased in size fairly easily by selecting the “Resize Canvas” option under the “Image” tab and altering its width and height specifications.

Document file size is a harder issue to anticipate since Krita hasn’t specified a max document size. If you suspect this is the root of your issue, the easiest way to fix it is usually to reduce your canvas or image size as listed above. You can also change image size by going to the “Image” tab and selecting “Scale Image to New Size.”

4. You Aren’t Using the Ideal Settings

If you’ve gotten this far and find Krita is still slow and lagging, the last thing you can do is check some of your settings and see if any of them are causing unnecessary delays.

Some settings you can alter to improve performance include:

• Make sure “Delay” is unchecked under your “Stabilizer” setting in the “Tool Options” menu
• Disable the “Canvas Graphic Acceleration” setting found in “Configure Krita” under the “Settings” menu
• Turn down the scaling by selecting the “Bilinear Filtering” or “Nearest Neighbor” optins in “Scaling Mode”
• Lower the program’s frame rate to 60 or 30 fps by going to “Settings”> “Configure Krita”> “Performance”> “Advanced”

Conclusion

Hopefully, at least one of the solutions mentioned here and in the previous sections will increase Krita’s overall speed and performance. However, if you find that the issue remains, the root cause most likely lies with Krita itself or your device being incapable of supporting the program.

If you’re having too many issues with Krita, another great new graphic design software to consider is Placeit.net. It’s the one we personally use most, and it’s truly impressive. It should serve as a great stand in for Krita if needed.