Hi Lee D,
Thank you for your response. I had the duplicates in there to show you how the layers look after applying the noise filter and the other one at the bottom was to show you how it looks in my computer after applying the blur filter to it and tried to label them as such. Not sure if its showing what i see on your system as well. Regarding my usual workflow, I usually duplicate the background layer, then work on the duplicate. Once the duplicate has some desired adjustment or filter, i then duplicate that and work on the new layer as a new base to apply another adjustment or filter. I usually do this while disabling all the other layers that i am not working on. This provides a way to go back in time to a specific point incase i reach a place where i am dissatisfied with my current edit. I have done this with no prior issues before on the affinity ipad version and most recently it was working well with the windows version until a day or so when it stopped working properly.
Regarding the hardware accelerator setting. I tried turning it off and the result was the blur filter is now applied well and the noise is also working but its not exactly applying the amount as seen prior to applying. What i mean is, for the noise, when i click on the filter, i can scroll to adjust the amount of noise i would like in the photo. Lets say i adjust it to 100% and can see what it will look like before applying. Once i apply, the image looks like it has maybe around 40-50% noise, but not as much as i had initially seen when i was adjusting the intensity(which was 100%). Don't know if im making sense.
Not sure if this problem is related with the performance of the computer, but i did create a couple of macros a couple of days ago which were working fine. the day it stopped working i had just added 1 new macro and a gradient layer preset, then i noticed the problem later.