Filter Forge 8 - serious display issues + more

FF8: Just tried some new filters in My Filters and Day of the Dead in Misc, the display is not being updated properly while rendering, the right side and bottom of the image are not updated properly until the very end of the render. Also there is screen chatter in the transparent area of Day of the Dead while it is updating. The new Demiregular Tiles filter I am currently developing also has issues with both the display and speed, and maybe? functionality. I will post more info or send it to you if you need it to debug.

I will post my current OS info (on a MacBook Pro from 2015) here and the about from FF8 in the next post. I did reboot before verifying the various issues I have seen.

Unfortunately FF8 is not usable on my machine at this point.

An update to my previous comments, FF8 is somewhat usable, but the display issues and speed (about 20% slower) make it difficult to use. The Demiregular Tiles filter I'm working on is difficult to develop with the display issues, so I'm switching back to FF7 for now. Also I use Sophos Free Home edition, I disabled it and the display problem still exists.

Here is a snapshot of FF8 mid-render to show the display issue I am seeing.

OK. Here is the filter I'm working on. Let it render the default preset. Then change Tile Type to 2. You will see the picture above. After that, go to Texture/Misc and run Day of the Dead. You will see the same video problem plus some video chatter in the transparent area at the beginning of the skull render. Let me know if you can reproduce it. If not, let me know what you need to help figure out what is going on my computer.

NOTE: This is FF7 version of the filter so you can see how it works on both FF7 and FF8.

Demiregular Tiles TESTING.ffxml

Filter Forge is aware of the issue (they have emailed me), but it is not fixed yet. If you are doing a test render, you can Zoom In then Out to see the edges. But you can't do this when you are doing a full size (Save Image As) render.

Display border & transparency fixed.

However, the speed of FF8 vs FF7 is significantly slower on some filters on the Mac. The best way to illustrate the issue is to use Demiregular Tiles, then check the View Seed checkbox. On my MacBook (Mojave) it takes 3 seconds or less to render with View Seed checked in FF7.

In FF8, it takes anywhere from 6 seconds to 18 seconds to render viewing the seed depending on which Multipass preview is selected. Legacy is the fastest (6 seconds) and 5 pass is the slowest (18 seconds). Only setting the preview to None is fast, but that is not useful. There is much less difference in rendering time on FF7 when changing the preview type.

All other setting in Options are the same between the 2 versions. Let me know if you need any more information.

There is a FF7 testing version of Demiregular Tiles in this thread, but go ahead and try the Semi-Regular Tiles filter instead.

Use the default preset of Semi-Regular Tiles, then check the View Tiles Seed? checkbox. On my MacBook Pro using Mojave, here are my informal tests showing the timing in seconds of various Multi-Pass Preview options:

Code
FF7.007         FF8.004 Off             0.61            2.96 Legacy          1.09            5.66 3 passes        1.62            8.60 4 passes        2.15            11.58 5 passes        2.66            14.29

Hope this is helpful.

Rachel, we don't observe this discrepancy in our office tests of FF9. I'd appreciate if you install 9.0 beta to confirm or deny it.

Reporting the slowness as well. Not sure why but compared to FF7 FF8/9 is far slower with rendering.

A few of my older filters do run super fast on 7, but in 8 they feel like they're not optimized lol.

I don't have numbers nor do I have FF7 anymore so I can't say for sure but it does feel sluggish at this point. Kinda frustrating.

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2016)
2.9 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3

Skybase, that's amazing to hear. We definitely need to test this out - please attach your filter or send it to the support team.

GMM, although frankly EVERY filter is affected by this somehow, either way, I'll send the filter. What's the contact email?

Ok in general as a quick fix you can open FilterForge 8 in low-resolution mode on MacOS. I suspect that the UI's scalable but taking up a lot of CPU power to draw? (Pardon me, of course, I don't know the tech behind this.)

This will make the text blurry as well as the rest of the UI, but whatever, you get much better interaction/FPS and render times in this mode.

I have a 5k retina screen, and have only been using FF for around 2 months now, so I never knew what it was like before this setup. I can confirm when I open the app using low resolution mode as mentioned above, some if not all filter previews render almost twice as fast!

Quote

Yuya wrote: Hold on a second... I just realized that on a MacBook Pro retina monitor while at max display resolution (i.e. set to "more space" via display settings) FilterForge 8 runs def slower. But on my XP-Pen monitor (1080p) it runs faster. I ran my own filter called RGBLand, which technically should run very fast. I tested the time on the same preset. Retina monitor time: 22.20 XP-Pen 1080 monitor time: 10.19 In other words does the resolution at which FilterForge is being displayed affect the render speed?

THis is is really amazing and surprising that depending on the monitor you are using it can be double speed !!!!

How is this possible that is much slower only because of the monitor high dpi and high resolution?

I thought that it would not matter in what monitor you are using, only the output resolution would make it slower.

I posted something related to this issue in another thread, which I've only just figured out the quirk even further.

In filter edit mode, I create a new image, say 1000 x 1000 pixels. Select the preset, and it renders a perfect clear image in 3.2 seconds.

Then if I save the filter, create a new image with the same size, select the preset again it takes 37.4 seconds to render outside of filter edit mode. That's a whole lot longer!

Could this have something to do with the above issue - seems pretty crazy!