Today many digital artists don't have a discrete graphics card in their computers , as they only use traditional paint programs that don't use GPU. Did you know that you can upgrade your PC with a sub $90 graphics card to use Expresii smoothly?
Budget upgrade
We recommend a GT 1030, currently the fastest low-profile single-slot card, because it fits most PC chassis that provide at least one half-height card slot and that it doesn't require much extra power (most cases you don't need to upgrade your power supply). There are many brands that make graphics cards with GT 1030 and they usually come with 2GB of video RAM. You can get one from Gigabyte for US$85 that is also Amazon's Choice . Those who can use Taobao can buy this GT 1030 card from Maxsun at only RMB439 = US$62 . We bought one when there's a discount at US60.
Left: GT 730 with 1G RAM; Right: GT 1030 with 2 GB RAM. Both are low-profile, single-slot cards.
Upgrade Process
We use a PC enclosed by a REALAN e-mini E-I7 mini-ITX chassis to show you how the installation of the graphics card is like. The CPU in this PC is a modest Intel i3-6100. Yes, Expresii doesn't require a very fast CPU for smooth painting as most of the work is done on the GPU.
Here's a video showing the graphics card installation process:
Result: smooth painting in Expresii
The GT 1030 gives very good performance: 200+ FPS on Full-HD screen resolution. For comparison, an older GT 730 only gives ~120 FPS. 120 FPS is already rather good for casual painting. If you're on a really low budget, you can buy a used GT 730 for much less (~US$30).
The resolution of your monitor does affect the speed at which Expresii runs. At 4K screen resolution, the GT 1030 still runs at a usable ~70 FPS, while the GT 730 can only do 30 FPS, which is too slow. Notice, here the FPS is our simulation frame-rate instead of display frame-rate.
For comparison, another older low-profile single-slot card AMD Radeon 7730 (with 2GB video RAM) only gives 60 and 20 FPS for FHD and 4K respectively. We highly recommend you get the 1030 so that it is still fine if you use a 4K monitor to paint.
Conclusion: Truly amazing watercolor doesn't need super computer
Pixalation in an artwork done by Kyle Webster in Adobe Fresco due to their limited resolution If you don't want to be limited to 8k x 8k output size as in many of the iPad paint apps, you should consider painting on a 'real' computer. Expresii is capably of outputting to 32k x 32k (in the production version) if you use a good graphics card and 12k x 12k in the current public version.
The rendering in Expresii is unique - you won't see pixelated results like in most other painting apps (like shown on the right). Together with our organic paint simulation, this is truly amazing! Don't be fooled by Adobe calling their Live Brushes (oil & watercolor) in their new Adobe Fresco app ground-breaking . The fact is, we achieved much better results in Expresii years ahead (for oil, see this video for what our Dr. Nelson Chu did previously for Microsoft).
Let us know if you have more question about hardware requirement.
The rendering in Expresii is unique - you won't see pixelated results like in most other painting apps (like shown on the right). Together with our organic paint simulation, this is truly amazing! Don't be fooled by Adobe calling their Live Brushes (oil & watercolor) in their new Adobe Fresco app ground-breaking . The fact is, we achieved much better results in Expresii years ahead (for oil, see this video for what our Dr. Nelson Chu did previously for Microsoft).
Let us know if you have more question about hardware requirement.
2019-10-22 Update: Slim desktop Dell Inspiron 660s
The slim Desktop Dell Inspiron 660s is from 2012. The Intel integrated GPU HD Graphics 2500 that came with the Inspiron 660s is not suitable for Expresii. We tried to upgrade another PC with GT 1030 too and see what performance we get.
6th-gen i3 vs 3rd-gen i5 - which is faster?
The Passmark CPU scores for i3-6100 and i5-3330S are 5483 & 5678 respectively, so looks like they would gives similar performance if paired with the same GT 1030. Experiment shows the newer 6th-gen i3 GPU gives much better performance than the now 7-year-old 3rd-gen i5 GPU. Specifically its 200+ vs 110+ FPS.
Current Expresii is single-threaded. So, we should really be looking at the single-thread performance. The passmark site says 2105 and 1652 for 6100 and 3330S respectively - this probably the main factor why we get lower performance in Expresii on the 3330S.
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