I’m still exploring the digital seas with my Eee 900 and I’d like to humbly state “Wine rules!”. No really, I have no idea when it begun to emulate wintab.dll but last time I checked I knew that tablet support for wine applications would be low on the priority list.

But here it is, I’ve been able to run portalgraphics products  mostly without problems and photoshop 7.x runs perfect! But sadly due to the less appreciated DRM embedded in Painter XI it’s not possible to run it through wine.

My mission was pretty simple, to acquire a digital sketch block, having acquired this minimal system it has been quite an interesting challenge to find an painting application that is fast enough.
I’ve tried out a wide array of different painting softs, but as I cannot find a concrete way of benchmarking the painting routines of the different softs I’ll have to be content with writing a small review on my experience.

Ok here we go, all tests were preformed on an Eee 900 1024RAM running Eeebuntu intrepid, sorted from fastest to slowest:

Photoshop 6
Fast! somewhat limited, it lacks most options for tablet dynamics.

Photoshop 7
No noticeable performance loss compared to PS6 but has most of the options that I felt missing in PS6. I’m still missing color bleed and resaturation under color dynamics, were those features not implemented until CS2?

Opencanvas 1.1b72
Just as fast as PS but it becomes lt becomes laggy at higher brush sizes. It crashed several times for me, mostly just after saving, but since it always keeps a backup script of your document I never lost any data.
This is probably also the fastest soft I’ve found that has color bleed/resat capabilities.

Opencanvas 4.5
There is some performance loss compared to oC1.1, most noticable is the brush settings quick menu that pops when you hold alt+ctrl; the extened features of that menu were barely usable.

Gimp
Slow… sadly yes, It’s truly heartbreaking but gimp is simply to slow to paint in. I guess it’s more of a scientific tool with too much overhead to be of any use for hysterical scribbling.
It’s packed with features but none that matters to us. Next!

My Secret Application
First time I managed to get it running the results were hideous, the ui lagged as hell and at first I thought the application had frozen when I drew the first stroke.
After a day of tweaking I and Henke managed to clean up a few hungry methods to the point of usability. War.. ops I mean the Secret project is still slightly slower than gimp on the Eee, and even so I’m still kinda surprised since I believe that our programming design was flawless. I guess that this is kinda the price we pay for using Java so next step is I suppose to translate the heavy methods into C/C++ and call them through JNI. But I haven’t been able to find much information on the potential performance loss caused due the JNI overhead, does anyone of you know anything about it?

Applications I’ve tried but failed to run
Corel Painter refused to start in wine du to DRM, but it’s kinda slow on my desktop PC too, but atleast faster than PS-CS3. It saddens me slightly cause Painter is truly my most beloved painting application, I just wish the corel crew could tidy up their display update routines.

Easy Paint Tool SAI this one failed to start at all, which is quite a shame, It’s truly one of the fastest next-gen painting softs I’ve ever seen. WineHQ reports that a few have managed to start it but were instead welcomed by non-working tablet support.  Windows users should really try this soft it seems some guys here have done a 3rd party english translation of SAI.


Afterword
I know that many of you would disagree with me saying that the speed issues I’m mentioning are hardly even worth looking at since the desktops of today have enough performance to run them. But I think that these matters are critically Important! The computers constantly evolve but so does the painting software. New concepts are constantly invented and we find ourselves dependent on new performance hungry features. Thus we cannot afford to have a slow painting framework, bad core design will bite your ass when you’ll least need it. (Hear that Adobe?)
A digital brush with no effects but opacity and size modifiers should be fluid on even low-end systems like an Eee.

I’m truly glad I’ve been presented with this fantastic opportunity to see the different applications to perform, I had thought my own project was fast compared to heavier softs like PS/Painter/Gimp but now I know that it was just a notion due to  not having a worthy benchmark system.