Display issues with GPU Acceleration on INTEL HD 3000

[monorural]

Hey there, I'm kind of lost with this, and hoping some of you can give me some advice.

I bought a new computer, Lenovo Thinkpad T420, which has an Intel HD 3000 Graphic driver, far better than the one I had on my last laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad T400).

Games run without problems, but Anime Studio works really laggy and slow. In my old computer it ran like a charm, perfectly and beautifully.

When the GPU is enabled in the preferences, and the 'GPU Acceleration' is disabled in the 'Display Quality' settings, it's totally unusable, even with new projects. The display will move like 1 frame per second when panning.

When I activate the GPU Acceleration, some layers will become reaaaally blurred, but in a weird and annoying way:



Original:



When GPU is disabled in the preferences, it will work a bit more, but still really laggy and is not an option to make big projects involving many layers with many lines and vectors.


I tried the following:
-Disabling, enabling GPU in AS.
-Updating and reinstalling the Graphic Driver, no luck.
-Updating OpenGL.
-Updating DirectX.
-Setting the Intel Graphic Card to maximum performance.
-Closing every other program to run AS alone.


The computer has 12 GB RAM (4 more than my old one) and Windows 7 (same as the old pc) with all the latest updates installed.


I really hope you can give me some divine answer to solve this problem, it's really making me sad.

Thanks in advance!!

[chucky]

Turn off shape effects and brushes in the display quality settings.
Turn on the gpu acceleration

[monorural]

It still looks the same after doing that. If I choose the layer that's blurred it will look good and let me work on it, but when I change to another it goes back to looking badly.

[chucky]

Ok ,you are on a laptop, you can have it fast or blurry, you choose.
Laptops are not the ideal tool for animation.

Having said that, I have never seen anything as bad as that blur you have there even on my ancient tablet.
I cannot explain that and it seems very bizarre.

You could also work on a desktop with a blistering CPU and top of the line gtx1080 that would be even better.
Any graphics program has limitations , vectors and bitmaps have different graphical requirements for display.
Software and hardware will always get better, but certainly Moto is much better than flash when it comes to previews.

I'd like to see the masking display improve and the more the gpu can take on the better.
A slider for gpu cache quality would be good too, but those will have to come with development.

A wise fox once said.... 'You can't have everything, where would you put it?'

[jahnocli]

A wise fox once said.... 'You can't have everything, where would you put it?'

Ha ha! Don't want to get off topic, but "wise fox"? I'll take any compliment I can get...

[chucky]

Monocular Fox?

[Greenlaw]

Wow, that does look pretty bad. I've never seen anything like that either.

When you say you have the latest updates, do you mean the latest graphics drivers from the Intel Website? Or do you mean the Lenovo website?

The reason I ask is that some laptop manufacturers tweak their drivers specifically for their products. And on the other hand, the manufacturer of the component (the graphics chipset,) may have newer driver updates than the laptop builder. Short answer, I would try drivers from both places.

For example, I use a Wacom Cintiq Companion for a lot of my work. I keep it updated with files released by Wacom (bios, etc.,) but I tend to keep drivers for the wireless, network and graphics chips updated from Intel much more regularly.

If the drivers are coming from Microsoft, especially for newer hardware, I would immediately update them with the manufacturer's versions. After Windows 10 came out, a lot of people had hardware issues because Windows 10 installed older or generic versions of certain drivers. I personally had network and wireless issues because of this until I updated my drivers with the manufacturer's versions. (In my case, Intel's.)

[Víctor Paredes]

I have a theory, but can't be sure about it.
Are the blurred layers scaled? If you draw something very small and then scale the layer a lot to make it bigger, then the software will show that vectors very blurred.
Please check this video:

[Lost Marble]

Here's a trick to get around this problem:

If a vector layer has no point animation, and is not being bent by bones, then Moho tries to "cache" the vector layer as an image. Then that image is drawn by the GPU. Drawing a single image is much faster for a graphics card than lots of complex vectors. The image can be translated, rotated, or scaled. But if points move, then Moho will not cache it as an image. Víctor's on the right path - if the layer is very small, but then maybe gets scaled up, the captured image version will be very low resolution and will be blurry when scaled up.

That's the background - here's what you can do: If you add a tiny bit of point animation, Moho will not convert the vectors into an image. So you could go to frame 1 and move one point in the vector layer just a teensie amount. The layer will then be drawn as normal vector and the blurriness should go away.

[monorural]

Thanks to everyone for the answers!

I tried what you said, Lost Marble, and it worked

I haven't used any layer scaling, but the layers do have different Z positions, maybe that's what created the issue (regarding what Victor said).

Thanks a lot!!! Now I can finally get on with the animation

[chucky]

That's the background - here's what you can do: If you add a tiny bit of point animation, Moho will not convert the vectors into an image. So you could go to frame 1 and move one point in the vector layer just a teensie amount. The layer will then be drawn as normal vector and the blurriness should go away.

Hi Mike, great to see you here!...
This is valuable information for everyone, an incredible revelation.
IT explains a lot of the unusual display issues I've seen in the more recent builds ( nothing as extreme as that though).
A bizarre workaround for a weird problem, this forum could be called 'gathering marbles'.

I guess it is worth reporting, maybe a built in workaround could prevent it in the future..... aren't you glad it's not your problem...?
I still think that a resolution slider for image cache or a scale dependent option would be even better.
Hey you should join the beta team!

I'm glad it is solved for you monorural... YAy!