Duskstalker

lets not make this a dirty witch hunt, okay? we put our concerns here, this came as a shock to everyone, and anyone in this needs to evaluate the new situation for themselves with possible options in either way. this certainly is an emotionally loaded topic, especially for those who depend on the affinity suite for their Job (like me) and feel like they got screwed over out of the blue. but its not helpful to attack freshly registered users or staff members. keep it civilised. i respect that affinity didnt moderate this thread. usually you would see threads like get wiped from negative comments or completely locked/deleted. I think the general sentiment and concerns got voiced and now its up to canva where this goes. lets not spiral that into a hatefueled poopstorm - this makes that difficult situation just more toxic for everyone. I will share my honest constructive feedback as years long pro affinity user in the survey they put out, just for the case i was wrong with my pessimistic view on this ordeal, but im sitting on packed bags because of all the red flags.

there is. canva is a company that runs a subscription based cloud service. canva is going to be publicly traded soon, that means canvas actions are going to be hypercapitalistic, because their only goal is to increase value to their shareholders, which mostly boils down to predatory monetization and absorbing competition with the goal of ultimately becoming a monopoly. adobe is mostly there. canva will integrate the "pro tools" from affinity into their cloud service. this is why they bought affinity. they didnt want a desktop app to maintain, they want to merge affinity tools with their cloud. because this is their business model. the affinity suite remaining a standalone desktop app on a perpetual license is fierce competition for canva at that point. when they are done merging affinity into their cloud they will of course shut down the desktop versions of affinity to force people into their cloud business. its quite simple really. and the pledges by former serif - now canva - employees are just that.

ive been reiterating this whole mess for some hours and im leaning towards switching back to adobe in the next days, which stings because i have a ton of projects based on affinity, but i dont wanna be caught with my pants down. as a pro user i need to know where this ordeal is going, all we know is some empty corpo talk thats mostly worded to dance around the pudding - it reeks of sellout. canva casually fiddling around with my business on uncertain terms is unacceptable. they could be disabling the activation servers tomorrow and force a subscription. i dont trust a single word ash said here or in the video. its super fabricated and dishonest, he cannot even sit straight while delivering that corpo nonsense.

my struggle with affinity aswell. working with affinity for print is infuriating sometimes. paths and strokes glitch out on export quite often and need to be handled in a very specific way that doesnt offend the affinity pdf export and CMYK is still rendered to display via srgb, displaying wrong colors for CMYK. ive reported on this several times and nothing ever changed. on the other hand i think affinity is more comfortable to work with, even tho that means my work is very hard to share with other graphic artists. i tolerated the shortcomings because affinity was not a subscription. im sticking to affinity as long as its viable, but i already feel the noose of the adobe subscription at my neck. when i have to pay a subscription, i might as well go back to adobe.

looks like affinity V2 will be the next adobe CS6. i dont know where to go after that. im running a business off of affinity. 21st century sucks, predatory hypercapitalism everywhere.

for me all .exe installed applications recognized theres an update and offered me to download it. i installed the .exe applications after uninstalling the msix version at version 2.31 a few weeks ago.

thanks for your input. i never place vector graphics in the document because this always causes issues, i always convert it to affinity file format and copy the Layers/elements into the target document so they are a "native" element in the document. i only strictly work in one single cmyk color profile (eci300%, because its required for the printers). in those documents that i run into issues i dont use any raster layers nor vector incompatible content, all same color space and color profile. everything is affinity created vectors and the line of text that errored out last time was a simple white text with a 0.3pt 100k stroke applied with the last letter not getting its stroke on export all of a sudden. I didnt do anything except resizing the stroke a few times and it came back in the export. which clearly hints towards a bug or application issue. once fixed, i cannot replicate it anymore. before "refreshing" the stroke, the issue would be on All exported PDFs unless its a fully rasterized one. I tried all export profiles and export settings, only fully rasterized works, any vector based output is borked. until, like i said, i resize the stroke, and then it exports fine, at least visually. it exported fine before and i didnt touch that line of text and apparently working on other areas on the document triggered something that breaks it. Update: so I decided to try installing the regular .msi version and wiping the appdata of the msix version of the affinity suite and while I still have issues with the print upload with this particular printer (I am in contact with their technical support to nail down the issue, will report back) I noticed a jump in performance. the msi version seems to be quite a bit faster than the msix version and the scores in the affinity photo benchmark are also higher. so i got that going for me, which is nice. right now i cannot say anything about corruption issues because i just installed it. i dont have big hopes, but its faster, so maybe its also having less trouble with pdf exports lol

Hello, I do print work with publisher and recently the issue rate with the PDF export is sky high for me. Im running into rendering issues with every 2nd export and its extremely annoying. affinity being unable to cope with complex gradients is one drawback i learned to live with, but fighting all sorts of random elements erroring out on pdf export that look fine in publisher is getting too much for me. i run a business off of this and having to check every single element for rendering issues is extremely tedious and costs me alot of extra time and if i miss something, i gotta cope with the reprint cost. and i already had one big print with a rendering issue that slipped through that i had to replace and get things straight with the customer. i have the most issues with pdf/x4 (that i need due to gradients & transparency) and the most errors are either gradients or strokes just being corrupted or not rendering at all. for example theres a line of text and it has a stroke applied, and sometimes, randomly, some letters dont get the stroke applied while earlier versions of the file rendered the stroke fine. then i need to get into it and redo the stroke for it to come back. it all looks fine in publisher, its just the pdf export with vectors that are visibly broken. fully rasterized pdfs do NOT show this issue. i also had gradients that are just plain white or have black strokes across. I dont have anything to show right now because i either already fixed the issues or the files are under NDA. since a few months I also got a new issue: one of my main online printers wont let my pdf x4 files pass the automatic print file test on upload - it will just lock up and i cannot place the order. i always have to call back and make them add the files to the order manually. apparently im the only one that runs into this issue - and connecting dots it might be that im the only one using publisher exported pdfx4. im using the msix version. i didnt try reinstalling and switching the installer version because i need that machine running, its my daily app to use. so does anyone else have the same issues or some ideas to resolve that?

Hello, this evening i have been working on a logo and for some reason expanding stroke on the "asap condensed" font placed on a circular path fails to correctly expand the stroke on the letter A. Affinity will only do some truncated bits in the A hole (hahaha) but not the full stroke. All A's in the text fail, all other letters work. Creating a new simple text A in the same font and doing the stroke expand works. Just this particular text doesnt work - it also doesnt work when you convert text to path manually. Printing and exporting the PDF also shows the same issue. Heres a screenshot: And heres the publisher file: expand stroke corruption.afpub

no crashes, drops, stalls, flickering or other issues. arc has been running really well for me since december driver updates - before that, not so much. but today, in fact, in productivity apps, arc has been ALOT better than radeon. be it capture one, affinity or davinci resolve. the a770 is an extremely good option at its price point with 16 gigs of vram. just for reference, this is an overclocked 6800 XT with an overclocked R5 5700 and its scoring worse than a gtx 970:

before you get your pitchforks out, please consider that the affinity photo benchmark scores are easily skewed from version to version due to changed score weight or scaling. serif also stated that platform to platform is not exactly comparable. i noticed my cpu score dropped from 2.0 to 2.03, but that doesnt automatically mean that performance dropped, it may just mean that the same performance now reports with lower scores. this is also the case with, say, cinebench for newer versions. that said, here is my score with a ryzen 9 5900X and an intel A770 running native on win10: as you can see the A770 actually scores really well in comparison to nvidia. its just amd thats so terrible. i have smooth performance with the system. if nvida runs well and intel runs well, maybe its amd and not affinity. the truth is: amd is selling gaming cards. and amd doesnt care at all about productivity. i have had my fair share of issues with radeon cards and the intel arc cards in beta stadium actually run perfect in comparison. i had image corruption issues in capture one with openCL on a vega56 that baked into the export and it took over a year for an update (driver or program) to fix the issue - i reported that issue to amd several times. the corruption was caused by a newer version of the amdopencl.dll in the newer drivers. copying in the old radeon driver opencl dlls fixed the issue.

the intel cards are way better than amd in any productivity task for the money and also really competitive against nvidia - the a770 is the only good productivity card with 16gb of vram for under $1000. the only pressing issue for arc is game support and some teething issues with the driver interface. ive been using two arc cards for a month - im still getting into it, but for video and photo editing those cards work better than my amd cards already.

for intel arc the scores are good. its an issue isolated to amd. intel arc is so fresh and unoptimized - if amd doesnt work with affinity, it seems the openCL of RDNA is just broken.

with the new 2.0.3 update the benchmark got changed. the scores for my A770 improved from 9000 to 13000, roughly. the cpu score decreased a little bit. can someone else retest their sytem to confirm this?

AMD Ryzen 5900X, 2x16gb DDR4 3600 CL18, Intel Arc A770+A750 Multi GPU, Win10 For some reason the A750 is the main GPU in this dual GPU setup, even though the A770 is in the first pcie slot and is set as primary gpu in windows and in affinity. the a770 alone scores about 9000.

@Eroica yes, brush performance on amd cards is abysmal, especially with rdna1 and 2 cards. i got my hands on intel arc A750 - i have to play around with it some more, but with a ryzen 5 3600 @4,3 ghz the gpu scores 8000 points in raster single gpu. gonna upload the screenshot later, its saved on my testbench in the basement. considering @debraspicher had an rtx3080 score 10500 points here, with a faster cpu, the result for the intel gpu is actually quite good when you look at the price of just $290 for the A750.

i also hate the new install routine - not because its new, but because everything microsoft touches turns sour. a new installer could have been a good thing, instead microsoft takes away all control from the user - you dont see what happens. it feels like installing a trojan horse. after installing for the first time i was scratching my head where the install went. microsoft is just completely lost with the direction they push windows in. windows 12 will be like android, and windows 13 will be like slot machine. throw money in, use that one key you are allowed to use and be surprised what comes out of it.

5900X and RX5700XT

5700XT and ryzen 9 5900X. this is my gaming machine - workstation is running a threadripper 2920X and vega56 - so at least openCL works a bit better. but im quite fed up with radeons for work. davinci resolve doesnt run without stuttering either. capture one has started giving me artifacts with openCL acceleration again (thankfully not baked in when exporting, was a fun time in 2019), even had a gpu related system lockup while editing. time for team green, amd just doesnt care. checked the gpu utilization and the card clocks to its full 3D clocks and draws more power, but the load duration in the benchmark is extremely short. gpu only is less than a second and combined is maybe 2 seconds of load.

due to the new microsoft installer package i dont think this installer allows a different install path. its annoying.

@Leighi just want to report that with my epson ET7750 i also have issues with printed colors from CMYK publisher documents. whenever i export to PDF and print with acrobat pro, the colors are correct. this is where i have issues: publisher document in CMYK, pictures (jpg) in CMYK, placed (embedded or linked doesnt matter) in the document. when i print the document, no matter what i configure in the affinity publisher printer menu, i always get wrong and oversatured colors in the pictures (vectors created in publisher seem to be fine). theres something going on in the CMYK color management system. that said, all affinity apps also display CMYK clamped in the srgb colorspace, that also produces wrong CMYK screen output (especially on calibrated wide gamut displays). printing RGB pictures in affinity photo seems to work normal or at least not as obviously broken. if you need more infos, please just hit me up. i will provide everything you need. i can do some comparison test prints and scan or photograph them.

with this update i see basically doubled openCL performance with my RX Vega 56 compared to previous versions. the integrated benchmark was 4500 for single gpu raster, now its 9500. feels alot better, too. gonna switch back to openCL acceleration (disabled it because cpu was faster on my machine). thanks, great update

banged my head against the desk to 10 minutes because i couldnt find the transform tools to do it - turns out, they dont exist. cmon serif - this has been missing since 2017. please implement it. i need this to make advertisement previews on buildings in publisher with the print files placed on top of a photo. i mean i could use a different program, but i really want to do it in publisher because it would be a great workflow. dont wanna switch back to adobe 😕

i believe vega underperforms significantly, too, at least when comparing the photo benchmark scores and i have had some serious hangs while retouching with my vega aswell. i never saw any dedicated vega card exceed the scores of a R9 290X or a RX 580 or RX 5500XT and vega is significantly more powerful than those three cards - vega scores should be at least 50% higher than what they are at the moment, at least for mine and yours. that said, i dont know what kind the load of the openCL acceleration is and how well it can be spread over the CUs of the gpu and im no programmer, just my impression as a power user and hardware nut.

gpu shortages are a thing since november and will continue throughout 2021 because of the mining boom, possibly until early 2022. no way you're getting anything new in the next 6 months without paying triple the usual price or waiting months for delivery. i highly suggest trying to get a rx580, rx570, vega 56/64 for GCN architecture or a 5600XT/5700 for RDNA 1 on ebay - in germany there are plenty of offerings - quite expensive for a used old cards, but its way cheaper than trying retail. radeon 7 and 6800 series are gone except for those rare >1000€ offerings. i dont know your budget, maybe thats a sum you can easily put up with. for loaning you could try hardware stores in the UK or tech youtubers based in the UK, like buildzoid. he has tons of GPUs, he might has some spares.