Review by J. White

Painter 12 on Win 7 64 bit is horribly slow. I thought something was wrong with my machine so I installed it on a couple more machines(one with a clean Win install) with the same results. First off the program has got to be one of the slowest to startup software in history. If you have a lot of fonts on your machine you are going to have to delete a lot of them to get your total fonts below 800. If you don’t then you will have to take a 5 min coffee break after starting the program. Once you get the program started many of the brushes are sluggish. To really see what a dog it is run one of the scripts and watch your I7 processor stay at 100% while the fans speed up. The scripts run much slower on a modern I7 Win 7 machine than on an old 4 year old Mac Pro with 10.6.7. Compared to Painter 11 on the same Win 7 machine this runs like a dog.

On a Mac 10.6.7 machine things are much better. Some of the brushes lag much more than they should though. It is just not as smooth as the Painter 11 it replaces.

It is VERY apparent this program was rushed out the door to meet a schedule rather than it actually being ready. I have waited a month to post this because I wanted to give Corel some time to release an emergency patch to speed things up but have seen nothing.

Update on SP1:nnI have been testing SP1 and things are MUCH improved with better startup times and overall performance. I think the program now warrants 4 stars and have upped my rating of it.