colinmel

I am experiencing this too and have made a bug report. The workaround I am using is to reduce the RAM Usage Limit in the Performance Preferences to about 1/4 of my installed RAM (set to 2048MB in my case) Maybe this will work for you?

1.9 was crashing to desktop for me when stacking using the new Astrophotography Stack feature. All of my (massive!) 8GB of RAM was being gobbled up. I reduced the RAM Usage Limit in the Performance preferences to 2048 MB and it seems to run fine now. Would be interested to know if this works for others.

Here you go. Crash report attached attempting to stack 12 files. 8f6c6a84-6b9f-44d9-bd39-1ab538e25173.dmp

Some more possibly useful information.... I set the RAM limit back to 8191 MB and set windows task monitor running. Attempted to stack 35 images and just before the program crashed there was a rapid increase in RAM used. It reached nearly 100%. Attached is the nearest screenshot I got to the crash. It would seem that Affinity Photo just keeps trying to grab more and more RAM until it can't get any more and then crashes. Smells like memory allocations not being checked for success or failure?

OpenCL hardware acceleration has always been set to off. The GT710 is a very old graphics card!

Speed seemed to be unaffected by the reduction in RAM limit. There is still something not right with this. Should Photo 1.9 handle RAM issues better? I've been using Photoshop and Deep Sky Stacker on this machine with no memory issues at all. In fact no applications have ever crashed the way Affinity Photo 1.9 does. As regards the 'Apply' button, I would expect the 'Stack' button to be blue while selecting the files and the 'Apply' button only to turn blue once the stack has been processed. Hitting the blue 'Apply' button before the stack has been processed does nothing.

UPDATE! Suspecting a possible memory issue I changed the default 'RAM Usage Limit' of 8191 MB to 2048 MB. I can now process all 35 light files with no crashes! (still crashes though with 4096 MB set) (Another small issue - In Astrophotography Stack the 'Apply' button is highlighted even before the stack is processed. Surely at this stage the 'Stack' button should be highlighted?)

Thanks Chris! I know this feature does work as I have tried processing the same stack on another older AMD based machine and it works fine (but slower!). I even tried moving the graphics card from the 'good' machine to the 'bad' one but it still crashed. (no exception indicated, the program just disappears). Hardware acceleration set to False in preferences. The raw data files are lumix RW2 files. I've uploaded ten of them for you.

Using my main desktop machine (specs below) the astrophotography stack crashes after about 30 seconds of performing the stacking process if more than 8 files are set to be stacked. Have tried the 1.9.1.944 beta and this also crashes under the same conditions. OS and drivers up-to-date. Machine spec: AMD FX-8300 Eight Core Processor 3.30GHz 8.00GB DDR3 RAM Nvidia GeForce GT710 2GB. Driver 27.21.14.6140 Windows 10 Home 64bit. Version 20H2