Aongus Collins

I can't understand the negativity in some of the posts on this thread. The Affinity suite is very much under active development, with six updates in 2021 alone, and a patch in March this year. The focus seems to be on refining the details for a professional workflow rather than on feature parity with other platforms. Serif has made it clear elsewhere that a major upgrade is in the works for 2022, and it will be a paid upgrade. Affinity's value is outstanding, for software which (for me) delivers fully professional results in both newspaper and magazine illustration and greeting cards. For comparison, the Creative Cloud multi-app plan that most professionals use costs $600 or €737 annually -- more than 4 times the once-off cost of licensing all 3 Affinity apps. Even plugins for Adobe Illustrator are now adopting the subscription model. Phantasm now costs $140 a year plus tax (23% where I live). Again more than all three Affinity apps combined. Another plugin, EXDF-Pro (for importing DXF files) is $99 a year plus tax. So I'll be happy to support a paid once-off upgrade given the alternative! No inside information, but I wouldn't be surprised if Serif made some announcement next month to coincide with the Apple developer conference.

Yes, I tried an Intel installer, but it quit with a warning (attached screengrab). I cannot risk making my system unstable. Hardware acceleration in Photo is "nice to have" but not "must have", and not worth compromising the other programs and the system I rely upon. If Photoshop has no OpenCL issues with my Intel drivers, neither should Affinity Photo. Also, there are other bugs in 1.9x, which I haven't reported due to their randomness (daily crashes and temporary freezing), so I believe the blur problem is related to these latest releases rather than my up to date official drivers.

Downloaded a trial version of Photoshop, which detected my graphics card. Enabled graphics processor acceleration/OpenCL, and could not reproduce this issue on multiple images, using the same drivers and hardware.

According to Intel, "A customized computer manufacturer driver is installed on your computer. The Intel Driver & Support Assistant is not able to update the driver. Installing a generic Intel driver instead of the customized computer manufacturer driver may cause technical issues..." I have installed the latest official Dell driver, dated 22/1/2021. I may install a trial version of Photoshop to see if it also has problems with my card. A guick search shows that Photoshop users have also reported OpenCL issues.

@Komatös Thank you for sharing that information. I downloaded and installed the latest driver successfully. Unfortunately it did not solve the problem. In another thread, Serif referred to "a few rendering issues with some graphics cards using OpenCL and filters", but there appears to be more to it than rendering. If you export the filtered file as a JPEG or TIFF, all is you get is a white canvas, even when the file is opened in another program. File size in this case was reduced from over 12MB to 145KB, so the content of the file was altered significantly.

@Gabe I updated all drivers, but it made no difference. Again disabling OpenCL was the only solution. However, since then I had a chance to test on another laptop, also a Dell with an Intel 630 but with a different Nvidia card, a GeForce GTX 1050, driver version:461.72. And everything worked fine. So this could be related to the M1200 Quadro, or there is a specific problem with my hardware.

Hi @Gabe I'm using a Nvidia Quadro M1200, driver version 461.09, on a Dell Precision laptop with 16GB RAM. It also has an Intel 630 integrated card. I ran the Dell SupportAssist program and it reported that drivers are up to date and there are no hardware problems.

I've been able to reproduce this in multiple images. In v1.9.2, applying a Gaussian blur with a value of 5.4px or higher will create a completely empty white layer, if OpenCL is enabled. (See video.) Switching it off resolved the issue. Blur-Video.mp4

Thanks, I'd missed that. Very useful!

Since posting my previous comment, I checked to ensure all Nvidia drivers on my system were up to date, and whether the Studio version was compatible. They were, and it wasn't. Then I launched the Nvidia Control Panel, and spotted something I hadn't noticed before: according to Nvidia, GPU selection is now managed by the Windows OS. I followed their instructions and used the Windows Graphics Settings panel to set Affinity apps to hardware acceleration (see attachment). I tested the new setting by attempting to develop a disastrously failed exposure. The idea was to stress test. And everything worked fine -- no lag, freeze or latency. Also, in Affinity Photo's preferences, OpenCL which had been switched off was now re-enabled. Automatically as far as I can figure out. Anyway, the issue was resolved.

I can reproduce this exactly: lag in the GUI while developing RAW makes the the software unusable. However disabling hardware acceleration while retaining the more powerful Nvidia GPU as renderer solved the issue. Windows Home, 10.0.19042 i7-7700H 32GB RAM Intel HD Graphics 630 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050

Thank you for your hard work... all the best for the holiday season, and a happy & healthy new year!

Latest benchmarks...

Revised comparison of recent beta benchmarks. [Dell Precision 5520, 16GB RAM]

FWIW, here is a comparison on my system between benchmarks of the two most recent betas with hardware acceleration. [Dell Precision 5520, 16GB RAM]