Poor performance on Windows

[VektorKnight]

Well I tried to do some digging. I loaded up RenderDoc and did a few frame captures of me moving one of the artboards. I found that it rarely took over 5ms to render a single frame with 11ms being the worst (need 16.7ms or less to maintain a smooth 60 frames/sec). Nothing too crazy in the D3D calls that I could spot.

I did however notice that my CPU usage shot up dramatically when dragging an artboard or even a single object around. I don't have symbols for any of the Affinity products though so I can't really look into it any further. Best I could see from the VS 2019 debugger were some pretty hefty calls into libkernel.dll and libpersona.dll taking up to 2,800ms of total CPU time.

My experience is mostly in the game dev sector. I've done a few random things in OpenGL and Vulkan so I have a decent understanding of graphics pipelines. I don't see anything that stands out in the RenderDoc captures. Im going to say this is a bottleneck on the CPU side of things. Without symbols though, I can't dig any further and I just hope Serif can fix this eventually.

Im just throwing ideas out here but maybe it's something to do with a threading bottleneck (been there, done that). I know the "older" graphics APIs like OpenGL and DirectX 11 aren't super friendly when it comes to multi-threading. Might be worth it to move the Windows renderer to DirectX 12 or even Vulkan eventually. 

 

That's all I got, wish I had more. I prefer Affinity products to the competition to I'll just deal with it and keep working.

[mediumcheese]

I just want to add to this thread that performance for me on Windows in both Designer and Photo has been unbelievably abysmal. The attached video shows what it looks like just panning the view around on a very small file with not a lot of elements. The amount of lag and stutter is insane. Any change I make with an adjustment layer in Photo lags for over a second sometimes. WHEN WILL THIS BE IMPROVED????

I've messed with all the performance and snapping settings with no change.

My specs:
Intel i5 6600K
Gigabyte G1 GTX 1070 8GB
16GB Ram
Running on an M.2 SSD
hooked up to a 60Hz 1080p monitor and a 144Hz 1440p monitor

I get better performance on my 2017 Macbook Pro! This is the only thing keeping me from loving this software and recommending it to people. Please do something.

[shustovcreates]

On 4/17/2020 at 11:49 PM, mediumcheese said:

I just want to add to this thread that performance for me on Windows in both Designer and Photo has been unbelievably abysmal. The attached video shows what it looks like just panning the view around on a very small file with not a lot of elements. The amount of lag and stutter is insane. Any change I make with an adjustment layer in Photo lags for over a second sometimes. WHEN WILL THIS BE IMPROVED????

I've messed with all the performance and snapping settings with no change.

My specs:
Intel i5 6600K
Gigabyte G1 GTX 1070 8GB
16GB Ram
Running on an M.2 SSD
hooked up to a 60Hz 1080p monitor and a 144Hz 1440p monitor

I get better performance on my 2017 Macbook Pro! This is the only thing keeping me from loving this software and recommending it to people. Please do something.

Hi! 

Thats strange. Could you share your file for me to test? 

 

Also to add to this thread:

I upgraded my pc to ryzen 3700 x and rtx 2060 super  and performance stayed the same . maybe 5-10 percent better, but still not working properly

Thats strange. I dont

[mediumcheese]

9 hours ago, shustovcreates said:

Hi! 

Thats strange. Could you share your file for me to test? 

 

Also to add to this thread:

I upgraded my pc to ryzen 3700 x and rtx 2060 super  and performance stayed the same . maybe 5-10 percent better, but still not working properly

Thats strange. I dont

It's not file-specific. This happens even on new documents. From what I understand the windows versions don't use hardware acceleration at all. I assume my CPU just isn't beefy enough. I hope they eventually add GPU support for windows. It would be a game-changer.

[carl123]

9 hours ago, mediumcheese said:

From what I understand the windows versions don't use hardware acceleration at all. I assume my CPU just isn't beefy enough. I hope they eventually add GPU support for windows. It would be a game-changer.

The 1.9 Windows betas have hardware acceleration.

You should download a copy and see if it helps. If not, reporting back your findings will help the Devs improve it.

The betas install separately to the released versions so they do not interfere with each other but do not use the beta for commercial work (just test it) as that is not recommended at the moment

[mediumcheese]

3 minutes ago, carl123 said:

The 1.9 Windows betas have hardware acceleration.

You should download a copy and see if it helps. If not, reporting back your findings will help the Devs improve it.

The betas install separately to the released versions so they do not interfere with each other but do not use the beta for commercial work (just test it) as that is not recommended at the moment

Say whaaa? That's awesome I'll check it out. Thanks for the heads up.

[carl123]

Forgot to say:

I can't recall if hardware acceleration is enabled by default in the betas, so go into Edit > Preferences > Performance and make sure it is selected before testing

[mediumcheese]

Trying out the beta with hardware accel turned on. Seems performance of the tools themselves is better. Drawing shapes, changing colors and gradients, etc is very smooth, but grabbing and moving objects around is still incredibly choppy, especially the artboard.

My GPU utilization only jumps by 5-10% when moving stuff around, but it will eat as much CPU as possible until it hits 100%. Able to hog about 50-60% CPU while I have my browser open playing a video. Hardware accel doesn't seem like it's taking much advantage of the GPU at all. Bummer. Guess I just have to hope the next rig I build with a beefy ryzen cpu can run these apps better.

 

[carl123]

There is a benchmark thread (link below) where you can compare and upload your performance stats, this will help Serif improve things for different hardware configurations. This is the very first implementation of hardware acceleration so expect things to change/improve in the future

 

 

[Hellodesigners]

Hi,

Did you find a working solution?

Thank you

[shustovcreates]

Hi @Hellodesigners! My issue was solved become better by implementation of hardware acceleration. So in my case, if I want to increase performance, I need to enable it.

 

I've read your thread. Video would be helpful to understand it better and in with what kind of project you experience slowdown . 

I would start from increasing ram limit and enabling hardware acceleration

[mediumcheese]

@Hellodesigners Two years later and the performance is still pretty bad for me on windows. I've even upgraded my pc to a 12-core Ryzen CPU and still using my GTX 1070 graphics card. Still disappointed with performance with or without hardware accel.

[shustovcreates]

On 2/22/2022 at 11:46 PM, mediumcheese said:

@Hellodesigners Two years later and the performance is still pretty bad for me on windows. I've even upgraded my pc to a 12-core Ryzen CPU and still using my GTX 1070 graphics card. Still disappointed with performance with or without hardware accel.

Hi, did you try to reinstall windows since your post with a video ? I'm just curious if you tried this, cause these lags on the video are suspicious

[Hellodesigners]

On 2/20/2022 at 11:35 PM, shustovcreates said:

Hi @Hellodesigners! My issue was solved become better by implementation of hardware acceleration. So in my case, if I want to increase performance, I need to enable it.

 

I've read your thread. Video would be helpful to understand it better and in with what kind of project you experience slowdown . 

I would start from increasing ram limit and enabling hardware acceleration

Thank you for your reply.

It is a Ui design project and i use Svgs for every elements. I like to use Svg because they are lighter and i can work on isolation + have all instances updated through affinity designer.

Here is a video.

 - The zoom is slow down

 - I can click on layers on the layer panel

 - I have to wait some time to be able to use it

Thank you for your help

 

[Hellodesigners]

On 2/22/2022 at 12:46 PM, mediumcheese said:

@Hellodesigners Two years later and the performance is still pretty bad for me on windows. I've even upgraded my pc to a 12-core Ryzen CPU and still using my GTX 1070 graphics card. Still disappointed with performance with or without hardware accel.

Hi mediumcheese

Did you find what is the cause of your performance issue ?

I contacted the support and i sent them the recording so i'm waiting

Regards,

[shustovcreates]

@Hellodesigners Can you share this file to test? It would help understand  if it is machine issue, file issue or software issue

[Hellodesigners]

On 2/24/2022 at 11:39 PM, shustovcreates said:

@Hellodesigners Can you share this file to test? It would help understand  if it is machine issue, file issue or software issue

Hi,

Yes i will send it to you 

Thanks

[Hellodesigners]

Design (2).afdesign

[shustovcreates]

can you test?

test.afdesign

[Hellodesigners]

I tested the file you sent but i'm still facing the same isuse. Is it also the case for you or it is smooth ?

Thanks,

[NotMyFault]

I confirm the same issue. The file Design (2) tested on 3 devices:

1. M1 Mac: takes some seconds to start, the ok when zooming / panning
2. iPad Pro 2018 10.5 inch: Slow, lags severely behind to draw screen, rendering issues
3. Windows 10 PC:
   totally unusable. Designer fully utilizes 1 of 16 cores for several minutes. During that startup time, it is unusable / unresponsive to any input.
   Designer complaints about missing fonts. 
   After waiting that time, Designer is usable (panning / zooming).

 M1 Benchmark:

 

Windows Benchmark (GTX1080, 8+8 core Ryzen, 32 GB Ram):

IPad

[shustovcreates]

Hm. Your file was extremely laggy, impossible to work on my Ryzen 5700G which is always snappy.
 

So I created new document and pasted your data in it, then I removed fx from the layers in the bottom, and it became buttery smooth. I’m not sure if that was the solution was, I’ll try find time to test it more tomorrow

 

ps: I also tried removing every layer one after another but no luck

 

pps: I tested on IPad Pro 2017 and everything works smoothly all the time

[Hellodesigners]

Thank you @shustovcreates

When you tested it on the Ipad Pro 2017, it works smoothly immediatly after you opened it or you waited some time?

[NotMyFault]

4 hours ago, Hellodesigners said:

Design (2).afdesign 5.8 MB · 13 downloads

@Lee D can you please test this file on

(a) any M1 Mac

(b) on Windows 10, any Ryzen CPU, any Nvidia GPU. Both Photo and Designer become totally frozen for about 5 Minutes, whereas the Mac reacts more graceful to user input.

The difference between both platforms is so striking - hope this could give some insight where the performance breaks under windows.

For me it seems like single-threaded operation despite 15 of 16 cpu cores idling. On Mac, more cores get utilised (270% M1 vs. 8-12% Win)

[shustovcreates]

8 hours ago, Hellodesigners said:

Thank you @shustovcreates

When you tested it on the Ipad Pro 2017, it works smoothly immediatly after you opened it or you waited some time?

Yes Ipad is immediately responsive

I tested  it more, your file becomes responsive after 3 minutes for me