Just slow...........

Hiya, I really notice how sluggish FilterForge is on my macbook pro. It has a decent cpu and 256mb of videoram, but when scrolling through my library of filters, less than half the thumbnails render in realtime, the others take ages to render (just the thumbnails) the scrolling is far from smooth (its horrible), and also the preset thumbnails below the library are almost always blanked out, and take around a minute or longer to appear. I have a fast internet connection in case your thinking thats the issue.

Does any one else find the app quite sluggish? I just wanted to bring it to the attention of the developers because its a bit of a pain.

Please note, I'm not referring to rendering of filters, but thumbnails. Although if a filters preparing to render, whether I want it to or not, the app locks up for up to 10 seconds. All my other apps are fine.

Mac 10.6.3, 2gb ram, 2.16 cpu 256vram, latest V2 beta.

Cheers
Aaron

Hey filterforge Devs the interface still runs like a dog (and I dont mean a greyhound). Can you make it so that the preset thumbnails actually load up during the install? Or something so we dont have to wait 60 seconds each time we select a filter for the thumbnails to appear? And the responsiveness of the program interface is by far the worst of all my apps. Can you maybe run input detection in a different system thread or something?

OSX 10.6.4
2.16 coreDuo
2gb ram

Thanks
AC

Well I have imported all my FF1 filters-hundreds of, so it seems like everytime I load a filter I have to wait. Why not have an update button that can do all of them once? Even if the user was warned it would be less frustrating than having to stop working while FF loads a potential thumbnail. Better to get it done once and out of the way, rather than a repetitive problem. Sure its required when downloading a new one, but not transferring a library. Often I'll wait for one to render and then find Its not what I was after, so I have to repeat the process. Its a real pain having to wait. Some filters take ages. Is it actually necesary to render them or cant we install preset thumbs with the ffxml file? They'd be tiny file transfers.

/2c
AC

Its kind of two issues then.
1: The scroll windows are anything but smooth, and theres always a second or two between clicking the screen and getting its attention. you cant scroll through the filters, its a series of jumps.

2: Rather than a threading issue as you describe, its a case of clicking on a filter and waiting for it to render the thumbnails. Its ok if you've waited for that particular filter before, but if you havent, you may as well make a cup of tea, especially if you want to test out more than one new effect.

Little things that slow things up. Noticably. The waiting for thumbnails to renders the worst, but the laggy interface is also noticable, though not as frustrating.

I hope thats useful feedback
AaronC

I have the same complaint. A lot of the thumbs are not cached. When you open a filter to check the node structure you have to wait, sometimes 20 minutes for it to chug through all the tiles filling in the missing tile thumbnails. It is a serious workflow block. I would eagerly sacrifice drive space to cache ALL states, renders and thumbnails of my filters. I like to create filters with a lot of heavy processing and this issue has made me use filter forge like I would Lightwave or any other app where I need to interact with it... then let it do work for long periods... then interact with it again. In FF's case, it's completely due to an interface issue! I'm not putting it aside and doing other things because it's doing something USEFUL.. no I have to repeatedly stop working with FF while it refreshes something that could have easily been cached the last time I was there. It's pretty frustrating.

I have a mac and a windows version, the Mac is a 8 core pro tower. The windows machine a quad. On both there are many interface issues on both

I've downloaded the demo of 2.0, and sure enough, it seems just as slow as ever. Click on a "preset" and it can take 5 minutes for the preview to finish rendering. Why this isn't stored as a JPEG that loads instantly is a mystery to me. I see it's using 3 or 4 CPUs in my Mac Pro 8 core tower. Just rendering a preset raises the CPU temperature 10 degrees Fahrenheit, to 97F. Just to look at a preset. (My machine usually operates on most tasks at about 85 degrees.)

Beyond the resource issues, this is a tool that takes a lot of playing and experimentation to learn and use effectively. Problem is, every little tweak takes minutes to run. If there were some way to get quick feedback (a sort of preview render, as in Vue or other 3D packages), it might be more usable.

I'll duplicate this post in the wishlist forum.

I believe I'm seeing the same problem. Stats:

- Modern MacBook Pro (2017 model, 16GB ram--I can get more detailed specs if needed, but suffice it to say it's a relatively quite powerful computer), running the newest version of MacOS
- Filter Forge 8 trial
- with this filter and more than a hundred user presets (which are available from my GitHub repo as described at that thread)
- The thumbnails for the filter have already rendered on a previous run of the program

I get forbiddingly long forced waits (with a "wait" cursor indicator--the program is not responding) when I simply scroll the thumbnail previews. As in I must wait 10 seconds or more after I click and drag down the thumbnail preview scroll bar. This gets even worse (always a much longer wait) if I try to click and drag the right or top border of the thumbnail preview area, to increase the number of thumbnail previews displayed. Sometimes this appears to make the program hang: I wait a minute or more and the best guess is that it will never respond, and I can only continue to use it if I force terminate and relaunch the program.

My guess is that it is repeatedly re-rendering the thumbnails in the background, which it shouldn't be after they have already rendered. Perhaps the program never thinks that it has finished rendering so many user presets, so it just re-renders them ad infinitum?

On a comparably powerful Windows PC and Filter Forge 7, I don't encounter this issue: scrolling is snappy and responsive without any slowdown. This appears to be a Mac-only insane power user problem.

FF8 is clearly slower than FF7 on a MacBook Pro. Read this. On top of it, the Windows version has always been a lot faster, especially with Bomber/Bomber+/Loop filters. I'm so disappointed in FF8 on the MacBook Pro that I'm not using it. Sticking with FF7 for now.