Without any further comment, please let me share my short customer journey (first hour of contact with Affinity Photo):
- Read a positive review of Affinity Photo today
- Went to the web site and saw the 50% discount and the price. Nice.
- Downloaded the test version and installed it.
- Watched the first tutorial video on https://affinity.serif.com/de/tutorials/photo/desktop/category/basics/ about the basics of the GUI. Nice.
- Watched the literally second tutorial video on the same page, which was about hardware acceleration. Seems to make a big difference according to that video.
- Found out in the application that hardware acceleration doesn't work on my machine, the program says that "a modern GPU is needed". I use a Radeon 5500 XT, which is a very common and not really old graphics card, and Windows 11. I'm thinking it's probably a driver issue and click on "more information."
- I am taken to https://affinity.help/photo/English.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Extras/hardwareAcceleration.html?title=Hardware acceleration
- It says "Affinity support for OpenCL compute acceleration [...] requires GPU support for Direct3D 12 Feature Level 12.0, meaning the GPU must feature AMD's GCN (Graphics Core Next), NVIDIA's Maxwell, or Intel HD Graphics 510 (Skylake) or a later microarchitecture." My card does easily support that (I needed to google to find that out though).
- I'm wondering what's going on, and only further googling brings me to this thread, where I learn that this is an issue that affects Affinity Photo on all newer AMD cards, has been open for more than a year, Affinity is basically only waiting for AMD, and nobody thought it necessary to mention it in the application or on the help page.
I will continue to evaluate the software of course, but I just wanted to share this experience with Affinity.