nitro912gr

please follow up with that other applications have somehow fixed this problem so how is it still on AMD's side if others made it work?
I still don't understand why the silence here.

Can't disagree with that, the low entry price make it easy to jump in. Also the big sale point was that designer (that I use mostly) perform 10fold better and utilize the modern hardware, unlike adobe illustrator that refuse to see more than a core (not that designer use them all the time, but I have noticed way more utilization and many times hit 100% of CPU usage).
But the hardware that is having problem now is not some cheap intel integrated GPU, are top tier AMD cards and that's what it bites hard.
And atm I honestly believe that AMD GPUs are offering a better value than nVidia (that had the audacity to charge 200 euros for 1630). That being said I don't disagree that changing GPUs is not the way to fix to the problem, if you are not about to upgrade anyway.
Anyway, the biggest issue here is the lack of input from serif themselves, they don't say anything about it here, they don't even bother to upgrade the system requirements so people at least know, they still state that all you need for GPU acceleration is a DX 12.0 GPU.
And honestly I think the apps now are leaning more heavy on GPU than on CPU because with no GPU acceleration the performance is horrible, something that I didn't noticed before they introduce GPU acceleration.

Well lets be honest here, the vast majority of the people who have bought AF products did so because they are astronomically cheaper than Adobe products and do a similar job. Those people wont have 20-30 times that amount of money to buy new graphics cards or new computers just to run Affinity products. If they did, they would have stuck with Adobe products. Yes there are exceptions, but it's the low cost that brings almost everyone to AF products.
Not totally related to what you've said, but slightly. It also addresses someone further up who was suggesting buying a new NVidia card for ~£1000 for a product that costs £25 when on sale. Crazy.

I do not think we are many.
Now what I will say next it is pure speculation and only my point of view on this situation.
I think Sarif had way higher expectations about their software adoption to the Windows platform, and probably it is very small, compare to the macOS or iPadOS. If I can guess, Win is probably under 5% of all Affinity users - unfortunately. So there is no big pressure, and it is not economically sensible to solve this in a quick manner - unfortunately it creates an egg and chicken problem. And overall it is rather small company. I would not be surprised if internally Sarif regret doing windows releases and when we get Affinity Suit 2.00 there will be no windows release of it, I hope not but...
One last thing is that even today requirements on a product page are still not changed, and mislead new customers about possible hardware acceleration, this fact is just bad!

I can have it enabled, but the app literally crashes with anything that I do. It’s fine with it disabled, but why bother upgrading a GPU, if I’ll get similar performance as my previous one...

Yep, they need to fix this. I’ve switched over to a 3080TI and still can’t have OpenCL activated. It just keeps crashing. Coming from a 5700XT, I thought it would fix my issues. 

Maybe I should have worded it as:
"It's a toggle, if it's not working the way you want, click it again"

oh yeah sorry, this problem is going for so long that I totally forgot that they disabled it due to poor performance...
But I agree we should get the option back and see for ourselves if it worth it. I believe in my scenario at home that I have a Ryzen 2600 and Radeon 5500XT I will get better performance no matter what.

I have been evaluating the compile latency of AMD drivers, using the code posted by the developers at github for a few months now (since i noticed the issue myself).
https://github.com/MarkIngramUK/ocl-compile-benchmark
My experimentation in Windows 11, starting from driver Adrenalin 21.10.2 all the way up the most recent Pro 22Q2 shows very reasonable latency with the latest (22Q2) being around 62-63ms on an RX6900. The best result on Windows was with the default Win11 driver (no AMD driver installed) with a latency slightly above 53ms, while with a small modification (of time measurement code) the same code can run in Linux. I tested it with the open source driver (in linux-kernel 5.17-5.18) the latency I measured was around 22ms. So, no matter how hard i tried to reproduce the issue (out of my own academic curiosity); i couldn't get any latency in the order of magnitude mentioned (of around 1400ms) in the github post (for the Radeon 5000 series).
Sadly it also seems that all recent Affinity releases have this restriction, so there is now way to enable HW acceleration in the application and test it, if they don't remove this restriction in a future release. We can only hope that they address this issue at least in their next major release (v.2). And i personally don't see a reason for it any longer, although i understand that there might have been an issue affecting several users at a given point in time using a specific system configuration (OS, driver, etc). Even if for specific configurations this might still be the case, i believe they should make it at least possible to enable the hardware acceleration (even if we need to acknowledge the risk and modify some configuration file) in any OpenCL capable device, so that we can also measure the performance from the benchmark as well as in real test cases in the application and provide feedback back to the developers.

Should work Ok with the Affinity defaults, at least under MacOS Catalina. - Can't tell for Big Sur/Monterey since I don't use those.

You would have more luck getting an answer to your question if you included the make, type and year of the Mac. I am not going to check which card is in my 2012 13 inch MacBook Pro but I can say for certain that that one doesn't support the GPU.

I have Vega56 in one PC and on this card the GPU acceleration works. But I have no idea it would work on integrated Vega
 

but if adobe have hardlocked their files like this, what they can do? The only thing we can do is to ask stock providers to make pdf compatible files.

Hello I tried after a format to go adobe free and got the same problem with EPS files.
I suggest all of us to sent emails to the tech support of the stock sites we are working with and ask them to require from uploaders to upload Ai files with PDF compatibility.
I will do this for freepik, please do the same everyone. If there are enough emails asking that they will realize that we design in a world where exists many more programs than the ones from adobe.
Those EPS files can't open in anything else but the illustrator, and we are so many people working so many programs out there, designer, draw, inkscape, xara, we just need to unite our voices to be heard and not take silly suggestions like to pay the one program they feel comfortable with.
After all it is not like we are asking for affinity designer files, we are just asking for files compatible with everything that take little to no effort to be made, just save Ai with a tickbox.

Hello again,
I understand the frustration and i hope this post will help towards solving this driver issue. For those users that somehow feel that buying Affinity Photo on an AMD setup doesn't really work out because of this driver issue (including myself), i would advise you to contact support and ask for a refund, if you purchased it no later than 2 weeks (i gave it a try and Serif promptly refunded me, so i must admit they reacted excellent on it). However, Affinity Photo is an great photo editor and i really like it's features and how it's organized, so this refund wasn't really the best possible outcome for me. I would prefer to hear that the issue is fixable; and, i will actually promptly buy it back (discount or not) when the developers confirm that there is a solution to this driver issue, in this or a future version of the software.
My academic curiosity also led me one step further, to try to reproduce the problem using the source code that @Mark Ingram posted on github. Tests run on Windows 11, using two different drivers: Adrenalin 22.5.1 and Adrenalin 22.5.2 (latest release).
The results for each driver are posted below:
Compiling kernel for device AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (OpenCL 2.0 AMD-APP (3380.6)):
Run 1: 342.111ms
Run 2: 71.863ms
Run 3: 69.1439ms
Run 4: 68.1999ms
Run 5: 71.0923ms
Run 6: 68.409ms
Run 7: 67.6458ms
Run 8: 67.3344ms
Run 9: 71.4381ms
Run 10: 67.9187ms
Average: 96.5156ms
Compiling kernel for device AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (OpenCL 2.0 AMD-APP (3417.0)):
Run 1: 350.606ms
Run 2: 63.0614ms
Run 3: 62.748ms
Run 4: 65.0131ms
Run 5: 68.3654ms
Run 6: 63.8348ms
Run 7: 63.1042ms
Run 8: 64.7047ms
Run 9: 66.8371ms
Run 10: 67.9719ms
Average: 93.6247ms
They look a bit better compared to the Radeon Pro W6800, and actually much better than the RX 5700. Do you think that these new drivers may actually be solving the issue? Are those overheads acceptable for the application to work properly?
(More information on the build setup can be provided directly to the developers if needed, omitted from this post for brevity).
All the best

Hi,
+1 Suffering from the issue. I recently changed my GPU from an old RX 480 to the latest and greatest RX 6900 XT and i noticed that OpenCL acceleration stopped working on Affinity Photo. I tried different versions of the application and the AMD Driver but without much luck.
I had a look at the discussion and also had a look at the code you published at github. I understand that fixing performance of the OpenCL compiler within the driver would significantly improve the situation and i would certainly support you 100% that it needs to be fixed.
However, i believe that Serif developers could make a workaround to fix the performance issue by simply moving all the overhead outside the critical path and into the initialization phase (startup) of the application (if not already doing so). Yes, i agree, the application would take a couple more seconds to load, but when the kernel is already pre-compiled at startup, and only an enqueue of the arguments and the kernel is required to do the job when requested (when the user makes something that requests the OpenCL kernel to execute), the overall user experience should be totally unaffected by this issue. Furthermore, I believe this would significantly improve the overall performance on all OpenCL capable devices.
* My suggestion assumes that the execution performance of the OpenCL kernel is unaffected by the driver issue. I am also aware that this might sound trivial when looking at the "HelloWorld" example, but it might be way more complicated, time consuming and challenging when it comes to the real application.
Nevertheless, I hope you take this feedback into consideration and i would be really happy to see the full potential of the latest Radeon GPUs within affinity again.

I have not tried this with two dedicated GPU but on my laptop I am able to switch between the integrated GPU and the dedicated GPU for the Affinity programs to use.

Are you asking whether the Affinity applications on Windows will make use of multiple GPUs, or whether you can restrict them to using a specific GPU if you have multiple GPUs?
The answer to the first should be yes, as the Benchmark function has a "combined GPU" section.
The answer to the second should also be yes. You can select a GPU for rendering in the Performance section of the application Preferences. That would handle part of it, but not all of it, I think. For the rest, you can also (I think) configure Windows to use a specific GPU for a specific application.

Now I feel stupid, I'm sure I tried it many times but didn't work, I tried it again and it is as you described.
But it seems that in windows there is so shortcut to add, only to subtract.

AMD released a new Chipset Driver a few days ago and today a new GPU driver.
Is there any hope that they have fixed their OpenCL kernel compiler? I am uncertain, because i couldn't find it being mentioned in the release notes.
 

Here is a quick guide on how to report the bug, I already sent the report on my side and explained everything, but I also made sure to say multiple times "fix openCL on your driver", fingers crossed but if this keep going like this I will break tradition and jump to the green team next time the market normalize.
 
https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/amdbrt?utm_campaign=report&utm_medium=redirect&utm_source=301

We are pleased to announce an update for the Windows release of Affinity Designer, version 1.10.5
The detailed changes in Affinity Designer for Windows 1.10.5 (over the last release Affinity Designer for Windows 1.10.4) are as follows:
Fixes & Improvements:
Fixed registration failure (will now use the browser to complete registration, rather than attempt it in-app) Improved performance of artboards with many Text Frames. Fixed possible rendering issues with Raster elements. Help & localisation improvements. The improvements in 1.10 over 1.9 are listed in some detail in this 1.10.0 Designer Windows update announcement
UPDATING TO THIS VERSION (free for existing customers)
The software version can be seen on the splash screen and the About dialog (in Help > About Affinity Designer).
If you’ve purchased from the Affinity Store— each time you start the Affinity Store software it will check for updates and offer any available update. The latest update will install over the top of any earlier version, with no need to uninstall. You can download the latest installer by logging into the affinity store here and find the order in your account and use the "Download" button in there. Alternatively, this new release (and previous versions of Affinity Designer for Windows) can be downloaded from this link (that installer is NOT for Windows Store purchases and needs a product key).
If you’ve purchased from the Microsoft Store— Microsoft Store updates are done automatically by the operating system (each time you start the application). If this does not happen for you, open the Windows Store app and click the three dots in the top right corner of the app and then go to Downloads and Updates. Click Get Updates. This should hopefully force the update to show.

Their OpenCL kernel compiler is much slower than it used to be. I have a sample repo demonstrating the problem here:
https://github.com/MarkIngramUK/ocl-compile-benchmark
Pinching the results from that repo:
AMD Radeon PRO W6800 (OpenCL 2.0 AMD-APP (3354.13)): 143ms
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (OpenCL 2.0 AMD-APP (3188.4)): 1400ms
AMD Radeon (TM) R9 390 Series (OpenCL 2.0 AMD-APP (3110.7)): 53ms
The top result is what I've just tried now, with the latest drivers. The middle result is what I originally filed the bug with AMD. The last result is a non RDNA GPU (i.e. unaffected by the slow compilation bug).
Driver 3354.13 appears to be 10X faster than 3188.4, but that's still 3X slower than it was originally.

I'm in regular contact with AMD, and I haven't been told that, so I would suggest that the AMD support person isn't being entirely truthful there. 

But that post is more than 7 months old now.
And i recently was in contact with the AMD support and they hinted, that they seem to think it is Serifs turn to fix that.