Beam Bench Docs

Canvas stutters

Pan, zoom, or selection feels janky. Frames drop.

You see

Smooth interactions like panning the canvas or selecting with a rubber band feel jerky. Frame rate drops noticeably.

What is happening

The canvas renderer has to redraw on every interaction frame. For most projects this is fine. Heavy projects (many objects, complex paths, large rasters) hit the render budget.

Fix

Turn off Antialiasing for testing

In Settings → Display, turn off Antialiasing temporarily. If the stutter goes away, the project is render-bound. Either:

  • Keep antialiasing off when working with the heavy project, on otherwise.
  • Reduce the project's geometry complexity (see App is slow on large files).

Toggle Filled rendering

Filled rendering is more expensive than wireframe. Toggle off (Alt+Shift+W) while panning / zooming heavily; toggle back on for layout work.

Reduce motion

In Settings → Display, turn on Reduce motion. This disables some animations that consume frame budget.

Close panels you do not need

Each open panel updates as the canvas changes. Closing the ones you are not actively using cuts that overhead.

Check the canvas object count

If you have a virtual array with thousands of expanded copies visible, that is many objects to render. Consider:

  • Reducing the array's count.
  • Using a virtual array (parametric, only one underlying object) instead of an exploded one.

If a high-DPI display is the issue

Higher resolution means more pixels per frame. On a Retina display, the canvas may be rendering at 2x resolution. Less can be done there; this is an OS-level scaling that benefits visual quality but costs performance.

Verify it worked

  • Pan and zoom are smooth (60 fps on most modern hardware).
  • Selection feels immediate.

Still stuck?

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