Ian R

I'd like to have the .bmp as a saveable format. not for print. Sketchup Style builder requires its files to be bitmaps

I'd be interested in knowing why disabling Hardware Acceleration helps (or can help) with reducing tablet or brush lag. Whilst it seems counterintuitive to me, it has reduced the very significant lag at times of the brush tool. I'll continue to use the brush tool this way for some time now to see what happens. 
I should add that the lag I experience is not particularly when using large brush sizes, but small brush sizes more often

You want this bit, it changed.

@debraspicher excellent explanation. I have experienced almost all of these issues... its hard to parce apart some issues because sometimes one's fingers and key presses and clicks are faster than the lag, so it can stack up, leaving some quite unfavourable results as you might guess. selecting anything for me once I have drawn in the viewport seems to create the issue.
I have other issues if I roll back the driver for my wacom intuos , I can't try this out.

I'm on an older Wacom driver set (since intuos4 drivers are not actively updated since 2020 iirc...). I did get an Intuos Pro M for another machine now and I will be able to report on it as well with more regular usage.

Anyway, I think I understand what may be happening. Perhaps the brush tool is not registering leaving the canvas and so the UI becomes unstable interacting with the "extended" canvas underneath. In one example I recorded below, it's actually drawing behind the UI/Layers Panel. Because the Layers panel seems to be a common culprit for triggering this odd UI behavior, it's possible it's why people are mostly noticing it during masking... I see it a lot less when just painting on an already existing layer/extended canvas work or painting on repetitively auto-generated layers such as with Pencil tool or Pen tool)... what will certainly trigger this behavior is lifting my pen while moving to access the "V" key for move tool... then I have to "reset" Affinity by minimizing the program with the mouse to get back the correct behavior.
 

Painting Behind UI.mp4 It's worth noting the Brush Engine performance overall is really poor on my end (see sig for full specs...). Perhaps it as a result of this off-canvas behavior, as I wonder if it has to "find" the UI/elements array each time it leaves the canvas/viewport. Another tell may be which elements seem to struggle most, especially lists of things, causes major stuttering in the program if they are pointing to resources. As such, there seems to be a hang of sorts when the pen even just hovers over these items once the misbehavior begins. Sometimes it requires a tap to trigger, but most odd behavior is "on hover" as the program "pauses" to search for UI elements to highlight (on hover).

Example: It really does not like me looking through the Brush list, which I've also recorded below. I've had the same issue with random but consistent lag accessing/hovering over the Layers panel. Simply clicking a layer can cause fits. So much so, it creates a lot of mistakes and objects being moved around without my control... very very frustrating.

Here is the example of the drawing behind the UI, particularly it is the Layer's panel that seems to be a common culprit... which may be why some people have more trouble when painting in masks...

As to the brush list/cat lag... Here is that example:

Brush Panel Lag.mp4

Other elements of the UI are also "responding" in a laggy/misbehaving manner when Affinity is having its fits. Sometimes can be on a fresh start, but like other people mentioned, fiddling around back and forth for a few iterations between the Layers panel and canvas seems to consistently trigger it. Brush Panel and Layers seem to always be the worst as far as lag produced by hover. But even clicking options in the Context Toolbar sometimes creates this lag response as things need time to highlight... for example, in this session it took a moment to toggle "Wet Edges", for example, when I needed in-between brush changes (another horrible bug...). In this case it was behaving badly enough from before that I left it unchecked to test the brush for size variance. Which I changed to a simple round which performed better-ish...

Hopefully the above information helps somehow. It's very unworkable.

TLDR: It seems like when this bug occurs, the Wacom pen/cursor is trying to access elements behind the UI, probably the canvas, and it's like the whole program becomes an extended viewport. The UI just doesn't respond at all.It requires that I min&max the window to return to a functional UI... It may also share a similar cause with the other issues of the general glitchiness/slow responsiveness of the UI once the program starts having these "fits" so to speak...


Edit: Huh. Found one of these in Event Viewer/Windows logs while I was searching for something else to rule out other problems. I looked at the timestamp of the recordings and this one was right at the starting part when I had noticed the behavior beginning (and poor responsiveness from UI/brush engine) so I began recording at this point...:


Video screen showing timestamp matches EV log in bottom right:

I also have been having a possible similar frustrating time with my tablet and AP since V2. There seems to be a certain number of executions in the viewport window - for me personally - that need to occur before my intuos pro medium ceases to work on the menu icons area. I then have to either alt tab out and back in or use the mouse to select an icon for the tablet to become responsive again.

I also have been having a possible similar frustrating time with my tablet and AP since V2. There seems to be a certain number of executions in the viewport window - for me personally - that need to occur before my intuos pro medium ceases to work on the menu icons area. I then have to either alt tab out and back in or use the mouse to select an icon for the tablet to become responsive again.

I also have been having a possible similar frustrating time with my tablet and AP since V2. There seems to be a certain number of executions in the viewport window - for me personally - that need to occur before my intuos pro medium ceases to work on the menu icons area. I then have to either alt tab out and back in or use the mouse to select an icon for the tablet to become responsive again.

This has been a constant issue since V2, for me at least. Once applying a mask to a pixel layer, painting within the mask, using a brush and then trying to exit the mask with the stylus (clicking to the thumbnail for the layer) is not possible. The interface becomes inactive for the stylus and shortcuts do not work. I have to use the mouse to switch to the move tool to be able to regain function of the UI to then get back to the pixel layer.

Any help would ne greatly appreciated. 
 
(wacom cintiq 16 pro, windows 10, AMD Threadripper, MSI RTX 2080 Super, 32gb RAM) 

+1 for this request... I get pdfs of garden plans with comments annotated over, with additional things like marks for edits and view points for visualisations also noted down. I need a way of converting these pdf images with their notes included into importable jpegs or pngs for the modelling software. Alas Affinity doesn't import any pdf comments or lines, and leaves me no option other than going to use another piece of software to fill in.

Hi,
I'm loving the Affinity products, great job!
One of the features I use the most on InDeign is "Import PDF comments", which saves me A TON of time. My clients add their "replace text", "delete text" or "insert text" and InDesign offers the option to "accept" the correction and applies it immediately (as opposed to my previous approach: copy the text on Adobe Reader and pasting in InDesign).
I haven't found anything online on this feature on Affinity. Are you considering adding this feature?
Thanks a keep up the good work! I'm spreading the word around my circle and people are responding very well to Affinity!

It is never expected behavior to have the display to differ from what you export or rasterize.
It is impossible to create an output to the desired specifications under these conditions.
So what is the solution to having a perfect representation of the current view? Also, where is the documentation that defines in detail the rendering pipeline sequence for layers, groups, effects etc?
Note:
I took the same image and applied the same effect in Krita. It does not have this problem. Each method of rasterization results in an image that matches the view precisely. It works exactly as a user would expect. An export or rasterization that doesn't match what you see can only be a bug.
 

This is one of the most often happening issues/things people do lately always report here and I wonder that Serif/Affinity doesn't make it overall more clear, that it can yield to data lost when using directly external drives like SSDs, NAS, Cloud Storage ... for I/O storage with Affinity software.
I repeat here, what I always and probably already adviced some 100 times before ...
As a rule of thumb, you best always only use your local drive to save/load and work with Affinity document files on and use any external storage (like SSDs, disks, NAS, Cloud Drives ...) instead just as a sort of backup and archive media. Meaning to copying/moving any Affinity files then to/from that external backup media only manually via the systems Explorer/Finder apps in order to prevent any data losts! If you have still some copy flying around of those files and they're small ones, you can try to attach them here. - Otherwise you will have to wait until some Affinity stuff member sees your thread here and offers you maybe some link to post them to (load them up to) then for an closer files inspection and if possible rescue of contents!

I get such issues in V1 mainly when Saving documents (~1-2 per month), occasionally when Opening, nearly never while Working in the documents. Sometimes closing and relaunching is sufficient to continue with the affected documents, sometimes they get durable corrupted. If one open document gets affected then also another open file gets closed by APub, regardless whether any change was done to it.
Very risky: In seldom cases (3 in the last year) it may even happen that a document fails during opening + gets auto-closed + causes the file on disk being corrupted. Then, although I did neither change nor save it in APub, it shows a different modification date in the macOS finder.
I am mainly working in two documents, I work with them since the current version APub 1.10.5 (~15th March 2022). I can't see any system as to what is the cause and when what consequences occur. In my impression the number of these issues became more frequent with one of the v.10.x versions and did less or not occur with v.1.9 and before.
It appears Serif is still investigating possible reason(s) …

I went back to using AP1 because it was at least more stable than AP2.. However, I just lost about 2 hours work because the auto recovery file corrupted the file I was working on,with no option for a recovery dialogue box appeared upon next opening, only that the file is corrupted. What are we to think of Affinity development if we are being ignored in such a vital situation? Auto recovery saving was set to the standard 300 seconds, but what good is an auto recovery option if it corrupts the original file such that it cannot be opened at all? How many users are actually experiencing this? Is there anyone from Affinity acknowledging this please? I know there has been staff in this thread but that is about the recovery backup interval, not about the fact of this bug corrupting files.

Here is another way to do a Spiral inside Affinity Designer (just make circles one by one instead of making them all at once):
 
 
Best regards!

I have been getting very unfortunate crashes where the restore file is corrupted and no file can be restored. If I get into an image and lose track of time (please don't reply by saying the obvious 'you should save regularly', it won't help resolve matters, because sometimes I forget, simply put). Being lost in the creative flowis an important part of the productivity. I'd like to support the call for an autosave proper, like most other software. When I use sketchup it saves very regularly and because it (also) suffers from these unexpected 'bug splats' as they call them, the auto save saves me alot of repeating myself.  Affinity, please give us autosave proper!

They have it "under investigation" since a very long time, I had some email exchange with them too about this, still nothing serious tho. They improved real-time runtime OpenCL compilation a bit (like 8x better times from ~1400 ms to ~150 ms), but it did not change the scores in benchmark as far as I tested it. So I do not know.

I emailed the AMD rep, he told me the issue is still under investigation, no updates yet. When he has any info he'll make sure to update me.

When I use the word professional, it is a 100% reference to whether the product is used in a professional context where the creative uses the product in order to sell a product or the product as a part product, or where the product is used in a context where the product in its final form or as part of something larger is finally to be sold. Or used by professionals by authorities or organisations. In this context several other professionals and professional equipment are involved. Printers, print shops, web servers, other creative, whatever. What my product can do is not as relevant as that it works in the middle of a workflow. And in particular as an end product.
When you throw around the term professional tools in marketing, which Serif loves, you have to be aware that someone assumes this is what is meant by professional, because that is simply the reality for someone.
I am well aware that some need less than others. But it is so much their need and tolerance for the unfortunate many necessary workarounds that dominate this forum. Someone has to take the term professional seriously because Serif uses it non-stop.
When you even advertise that v2 "sets new standards", that it is "Professional photo editing, publishing, graphic design and illustration", that with v2 you are "breaking barriers," you have to expect feedback from the disappointed. And it has come.
Double disappointment for those Serif customers when they are confronted with nonsense from random people in here.

Exciting times. With precious little in the way of recent updates, some users wondered if Affinity was dead—but no, we were promptly told that they were just focused on the next major version. And four months later, here it is!
A common expression amongst users has been 'hopefully in version 2', so here's my list of hoped for changes. I'm about to fire up my new V2 apps for the first time and see if all the hopeful waiting has been rewarded. I've divided my list into two main categories: 'UI frustrations' and 'Missing or broken features'.
 
UI frustrations
Window management (Separated Mode)
Ever since MultiFinder appeared on the Mac in 1987, we've been able to run multiple apps and see their document windows side by side. Over the years came other improvements like drag and drop between apps and documents. You lose some of those benefits when an app takes up the whole screen with a solid background. For this reason, many of us preferred a separated workspace (turning off Application Frame in Adobe apps), but after switching to Affinity, quickly discovered that Affinity's Separated Mode was pretty broken, with document windows and Studio panels seemingly having no knowledge of each other's existence.
After much criticism, Affinity finally responded in June 2020 with a help article titled 'Increase your efficiency with Affinity’s Separated Mode'. There was no admission of any issues though, and I parodied the unhelpful article in this forum comment.
Changes in V2
Affinity seems to have finally acknowledged the issues with Separated Mode. Their solution? Remove it altogether! The new 'Float View to Window' command kind of gives us the worst of both worlds… separate windows that still aren't aware of your Studio panels, and a big old solid-grey app window obscuring every other background app. It looks like Affinity might have just put this one in the too hard basket.
Panel management
Resizing Studio panels in V1 is somewhere between painful and impossible. To be fair, this was never a perfect experience with Adobe either, but Affinity takes the pain to a new level. Can't see most of your Paragraph panel? Hover your cursor very carefully over that one-pixel hairline between panels… Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor telling you the panel can't be resized (for some unknown reason). Double-click to minimise a panel or two to make more space… only to find that it added several inches of completely empty space to a different panel instead. Try to resize that one. Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor again. Start double-clicking ALL the panels until you can finally see the one you want. Utter frustration.
Changes in V2
After playing around with panels for just a few minutes, the results are mixed. Firstly, I can resize panels (without seeing the 'no entry' icon all the time)—great! Secondly, the hover-zone seems to have expanded from one pixel to around two—I'll take it! Beyond that, things are still quite unpredictable. For example, I currently have a massive Swatches panel full of mostly empty space, and a tiny Text Styles panel below it which is showing me only two lines. I can resize the Text Styles panel to my liking, but if I then minimise and reopen it, it's right back to the way it was—tiny and useless. Whatever algorithm is determining these panel sizes is clearly not fit for purpose.
On a positive note, on the Mac the Studio panels are now listed under the Window menu—exactly where they should have been all along!
Oh one other thing… I lost the Swatches panel in Designer. As in, it just totally vanished. 😳 I can hide it and unhide it again from the menu, but it does not reappear. Restarting the app doesn't bring it back either. This could be a bit of a problem!! (Edit: Found!)
Working with guides
Creating a simple guide the normal way, by dragging out from the ruler, works fine. Unfortunately though, Affinity apps lack the power and flexibility of other drawing apps like Illustrator, which let you select and manipulate guides like normal objects—positioning them numerically for example, or hitting delete to remove then. Illustrator even lets you convert normal vector objects into guides.
With Affinity apps, you have to drag a guide off the edge of a page to remove it. The issues with this approach are (1) you have to be zoomed out so that you can see the edge of the page, and (2) it's inconsistent with the behaviour of other objects, which can be safely dragged and positioned beyond the edge of the page. This creates confusion for users as discussed on threads like this one.
Instead, Affinity gives us the Guides Manager. It's a useful tool, but it would be less necessary if guides were more flexible in the first place.
Changes in V2
There appears to be no changes to the way guides work in V2.
Working with colour swatches
In my opinion, Affinity seriously dropped the ball in V1 with the way colour swatches are handled. Here are some of the features that are missing or broken:
There's no obvious place to put your custom colours. You have to find the 'Add Document Palette' command first, which then creates something called 'Unnamed'. Other actions may trigger the app to add a second palette named 'Document'. Once a swatch is created, you can't convert it to or from a global or spot colour. You can't select more than one swatch at a time. You can't drag and drop colour swatches between palettes or between different parts of the UI. There's no obvious way to add a Pantone swatch to an existing document palette. (You need to apply the colour to an object on the canvas, select the object, switch back to your document palette and click on one of the two 'Add…' buttons.) New global colours are given generic names (Global Colour 1, etc). Pantone colour names are not preserved when added as global colours (the most common requirement!) and need to be typed in manually. Global colours are not transferred between documents when copying and pasting objects. (You need to explicitly export a palette from the first document and then import it into the second document.) Global spot colours are not added to a Publisher document palette when placing a Designer file (unlike InDesign and Illustrator). There's no search field in the 'Add Global Color' panel or edit colour pop-up, making it almost impossible to select the one you want from a large list of swatches. (They aren't displayed as a list, even if you set the panel appearance to 'Show as List'.) There's no command to find and delete unused swatches from a document palette. There's no option to merge two global colours. When deleting a used swatch, you're not asked what to replace it with. (If you delete a global colour, all instances just get replaced with a non-global version.) Yes, colour swatch management in Affinity V1 is bad—really bad. In one forum comment I wrote, 'That's one thing Adobe got right, and something the Affinity devs would have done well to replicate, rather than trying to get clever and do their own thing. Gosh I hope version 2 starts to take this seriously.' Well let's check out V2 and see…
Changes in V2
(1) The 'Add Document Palette' command now displays a pop-up which asks, 'Please enter a name for the new palette.' It still defaults to 'Unnamed', but it's a small improvement over the previous behaviour.
(9) Both the 'Add Global Color' panel and the edit colour pop-up now feature a search field, making it much easier to select from a large list of swatches. (They also now respect the 'Show as List' setting.)
Aside from those two improvements, very little seems to have changed with colour swatches across the Affinity suite. That's a big disappointment, and seems to communicates that the Affinity team don't share the view of many users, that this really needed an overhaul.
Undo/Redo
In Affinity apps, the action of selecting or deselecting an object gets added to the undo/redo stack. This is counterintuitive, goes against years of established practice, and (if the user is not familiar with it) can lead to data loss. Only an action that alters the artwork in some way should be added to the undo/redo stack, as discussed here.
Changes in V2
Nothing has changed.
 
Missing or broken features
1-bit black and white artwork (line art)
Graphics applications have, since the beginning of time, supported true 1-bit black and white artwork, so many professional users were understandably shocked to discover that Affinity V1 apps offered no support at all for 1-bit files. The only workaround is to work with grayscale and manually compress your lightness levels. This is anything but reliable, as compression algorithms at export time will not recognise the difference between a faux B&W image and a grayscale one, downsampling line art to an unacceptably low resolution and adding unwanted antialiasing.
Changes in V2
Incredibly, there's still no support for 1-bit black and white artwork.
Turning off antialiasing
The ability to turn off antialiasing of exported graphics is an essential feature for any professional graphics application. Affinity V1 apps lacked this feature entirely in the beginning, but in response to a forum post in 2015, one of Affinity's developers added highly-customisable, per-object control of antialiasing. Then, in 2020, it got better, with a simple on or off option, which you can apply to multiple objects at once.
This is a huge improvement already, but some of us would still like to see a simple on/off checkbox at export for outputting something like a raster print versions of a logo. As I explained in the same discussion: 'it's about tailoring the artwork to different output media. That should be an export function, not something I have to hard-code into the design file.'
Changes in V2
Turning off antialiasing cannot be done globally at export—it must still be hard-coded into each object of the file.
Reliably exporting for print
Affinity Publisher's default PDF export settings for print-ready artwork ('PDF (press-ready)') turns black (K:100) to a CMYK mix (e.g. C:71, M:66, Y:66, K:76), which would be a disaster if not detected before your job goes to print (something which is difficult when there are no pre-press tools provided). There are other issues too, like line art being downsampled and antialiased (related to the previous two issues).
Changes in V2
This has not been fixed. The 'PDF (press-ready)' export preset still has an all-or nothing 'Embed profiles' option ticked by default, and still causes black artwork (like text) to get converted to a CMYK mix.
Previewing colour separations
Affinity has no alternative to Acrobat Pro. For print professionals, this means no way of previewing and checking colour separations before going to print. When combined with the issues mentioned above, the chances of poor quality artwork and printing are high.
Changes in V2
There are no new apps or built-in tools for checking colour separations.
 
Summary
V2 may have brought some cool new features, but it has only brought modest improvements to a few of the features which matter to me the most, while other issues have been overlooked completely. Having waited so many years for the first major update, I have to say, I'm pretty disappointed.
I'll still purchase all the apps, and I'll still recommend them to family and friends. They do a lot of great things, and you certainly can't beat the price.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of the issues I have with the Affinity apps—just a few that frustrate me the most. If I've left out some of your biggest issues, feel free to add them below with a note on whether V2 fixed them for you.

I contacted AMD and a representative told me that they're looking into this issue and that they would update me when they have more information.

I just upgraded to a ASUS Zephyrus G14 with an RX 6700s GPU and was wondering why it didn't seem any quicker than my previous GTX 1060 laptop. I really hope this is addressed sometime soon. This new GPU should be a huge upgrade. But it's not due to this issue.
UPDATE:
I ran the benchmark on my new PC vs. old PC. The old PC's GPU is running way faster on NVIDIA. This AMD driver issue has to get sorted. My new processor is running twice as fast, but that new GPU should be at least twice as fast too. Bummer.

Where is the file being opened from on your system? It's not something I've come across before, our apps have no reference to your Downloads folder that is usually the OS or your browser.
If you find a workflow that reproduces the issue please update your post and include your system information.

Next time y'all get the chance, check task manager and see how much resources the program is using... and if it seems right to you...