Large amount of lag when moving components in layout

Description of problem
I have been trying to resolve a problem with lag in pcbnew when moving components. It’s only a problem when using the modern toolset (both accelerated and fallback). My workaround at the moment is to use the legacy toolset for move operations but a lot of time is lost switching back and forth. Fast mouse movements when moving a component around also lead to large spikes in both CPU and GPU utilization.

Attempts made to resolve the problem
What I have tried so far is to reinstall KiCad, deleting the configuration files in Appdata and reinstalling my graphics drivers. I have also tried Kicad on two other computers. One with a Nivida quadro card where the same problem was present and also on a laptop with mx150 graphics which did not have any significant lag when moving components.

Computer specifications
OS: Windows 10
Kicad version: (5.1.5)-3
CPU: Intel i5 3570k
GPU: Nividia GTX 1070, driver version: 441.66

Has anyone else experienced these problems and if so do you have any suggestions on how to improve the situation?

Does this happen in both fallback and accelerated mode (preferences menu or F11/F12)?
Do your drivers support the necessary opengl version? (>2.1)

Yes this is the case in both fallback and accelerated mode. And the drivers are the latest available from Nividia and should, as I understand it, support up to opengl 4.6

What are your graphics settings in KiCad (preferences/preferences/common)? (aliasing, supersampling)

Are you on laptop with integrated graphics so that dedicated graphics is not really used when KiCad is running (maybe dedicated graphics is used only in fullscreen apps - games and such)?

Not on a laptop so don’t think it’s an issue of the wrong GPU being used. I reset the config when reinstalling so the graphic settings are at the defaults (no aliasing or supersampling).

How big is the layout you’re editing?

I just started noticing this also on a recent nightly… for me what helps is to close the schematic editor, lag in pcbnew disappears instantly.

Just two footprint with about 10 ratsnets between them as a test. It does not seem to get noticeably worse with larger designs.

Thanks for the tip about closing the schematic editor as well, I will try it out and see if it improves anything.

I have also tried running Kicad on the same computer under Ubuntu instead and there everything is smooth so the problem seem OS/Driver related.

I haven’t used the Windows version of KiCad for a while… Do you see any lag with:

  • pcbnew running in standalone mode (not launched from KiCad project manager)
  • pcbnew from nightly builds?

Tom

Tried with pcbnew in standalone mode and did not make any noticeable difference. I have not tried using any nightly build but I could of course try that if you think it could make a difference.

This is likely https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/issues/1865

We have a few things to test here in the build as this affects other parts of KiCad as well.

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