Issues with Wacom tablet and Affinity

[PaulMA]

Using Affinity with Wacom Tablet

I'm using Affinity on my Mac desktop with a Wacom Pro tablet and pen. I am finding that when using Affinity the pen does not correspond accurately with the cursor, causing the cursor to continue moving after the pen has been removed from the tablet. This is very frustrating when attempting to carry out fine adjustments, for example when using a Curves adjustment layer I am unable to carry out small adjustments because the cursor keeps moving after the pen has been removed from the tablet.

I have been in touch with Wacom and run through their checks and the pen and tablet are working correctly. The pen and tablet also work fine with other apps on my computer. 

Has anyone any suggestions to correct this problem, please. Best wishes, PaulM

[Dan C]

Hi PaulMA,

Welcome to the forums

Sorry to hear you're having trouble! Can you please open Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher>Preferences>Tools and tick High Precision Tablet Input and try using your tablet once more.

Does this produce a more stable result for you? If not, please make sure another input device (such as a wireless mouse/trackpad) is not being activated whilst your Wacom pen is in use, as this may cause unwanted cursor movement.

Can you please also double check you're running the latest drivers from Wacom? As these can help with input stability for the device. I hope this helps!

[markw]

15 minutes ago, Dan C said:

Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher>Preferences>Tools and tick High Precision Tablet Input

Er… where exactly would that be again Dan?

[Dan C]

3 minutes ago, markw said:

Er… where exactly would that be again Dan?

Apologies, please disregard that suggestion! This option is available in Windows only and it slipped my mind that it's not present on Mac 

[PaulMA]

Many thanks, Dan C & markw,

I have checked that I haven't got any wireless mouse running (although I do switch one on and use it occasionally, just to make more precise adjustments in Affinity. But then I switch it off). And I am using the latest Wacom driver. The problem remains, unfortunately.

I did wonder about the RAM Usage Limit in Affinity Preferences > Performance. Mine is set at 46080 MB at the moment - could it be that the Wacom tablet and/or pen is RAM 'hungry' and this causes the cursor 'lag'?

Any further ideas would be gratefully accepted.

Best wishes, PaulMA

[Dan C]

No problem, I'm sorry to hear this - I doubt the RAM limit has an effect here, but I would like to see your other settings. Could you please open Affinity Preferences>Performance and provide a screenshot of your settings here?

Many thanks!

[markw]

Just to clarify Paul, the latest Wacom Mac driver as of today is 6.3.38-3. Is that the version you have?
I just mention this because I know some people who have used the Wacom Desktop Centre to check their driver is up to date and it has sometimes failed to notify when a new driver is available.

[PaulMA]

Thanks, Dan C, for an unknown reason my screenshot app, "Grab', will not allow me to screenshot the Affinity Preferences > Performance; as soon as I open Grab, the preferences window closes. So here they are in the old-fashioned way:

RAM Usage Limit: 46080MB

Disc Usage Warning At: 32768MB

Undo Limit: 1024

View Quality: Bilinear (Best Quality)

Dither Gradients & Use Precise Clipping are both not selected

File Recovery Interval: 300 seconds

Display: OpenGL

Use Only Integrated GPU (requires restart) is not selected

Retina Rendering: Automatic (Best)

Hardware Acceleration is greyed out

I hope this assists, best wishes, PaulMA

[PaulMA]

Thanks, markw, yes I have checked just now and I'm using the latest Wacom Mac driver as you have stated.

Best wishes, PaulMA

[SRU]

I'm having a similar problem with vector brushes. Especially when drawing long lines the lag gets unbearable.
Pixel Persona seems to work well, so does Photoshop.

Setup:
Wacom Intuos Pro S on a MacBook Pro 13'' with eGPU (Vega 56) and LG 5K.
Affinity Designer 1.8.2 (up-to-date), macOS Catalina 10.15.3, latest Wacom driver

Things I've tried:

• Turn of my external Trackpad
• Increase Ram Usage Limit to maximum
• Use the wacom with cable and wireless
• Restarted computer
• Reset of Wacom settings

Any help is welcome. 
Thanks in advance.

[SRU]

Update: I encounter a very similar problem with long (and wider) vector brushes on the iPad Pro.

So I guess it's an underlying software problem handling that information …

[PaulMA]

Thanks, SRU, yes, given that my Wacom works with most other apps on my computer (including Photoshop), I'm wondering that it is a software issue with Affinity.

Dan C, am I correct in thinking you are a staff member of Affinity? If you are, I'm sure you are disseminating this issue back to Affinity; please can you confirm that they are looking at this issue. Kind regards, PaulMA

[SRU]

Update: Today I've encountered a similar problem also in Photoshop. 
I closed 2 bigger apps I had open and then the situation improved—for Photoshop and Affinity Designer.

Maybe it has something to do with memory management, and Adobe is just a certain amount better at it?

[Dan C]

Thanks @PaulMA & @SRU for your patience here, I have been away from work for a few days, hence my delayed reply.

I can confirm I'm a member of the Affinity team and I'll be reporting back any bugs, as required.

I've replicated your setups (particularly SRU's as I happen to be using the Intuos Pro S myself), and using the latest Wacom drivers, AD & MacOS version I'm still not seeing this behaviour - even when using a 400px vector brush.

Could you please possibly provide screen recordings showing your issues? This will help me to investigate further

[SRU]

Hi @Dan C, 

Please find attached a simple recording.

This video is not about anything or even accuracy, but what you see is that at a certain point the cursor lags.

I understand that the rendering of more complex and longer brushes might take some time, but with the cursor lag there is a lost of control. Other times this happened way earlier and the cursor just continued to draw into the nirvana.

If I can help any other way to fix this, just let me know.

[Dan C]

Thanks for your screen recording, I have a very similar setup here and I'm not seeing anywhere near as much lag as in this video, so my apologies for that!

Could you please open Affinity Designer>Preferences>Performance and provide a screenshot of your settings here?

[markw]

Oops, I forgot about this thread!
I had originally thought that the problem was one of tablet mapping, with the cursor being shown offset from it’s correct location.
But having just seen SRU’s screen recording I see that the problem is more like one of brush lag.
In this respect I have exactly the same situation. Though it’s never really impacted my work much as I’ve never needed to do such a long continuous stroke as that!
So if it helps any, here is a screenshot of my Performance settings too.
System specs are in my signature.

[SRU]

I increased the RAM Usage Limit to see if it helps, it didn't unfortunately. 

[PaulMA]

Hi All, Today (27/03/20) I've downloaded the latest version of Affinity Photo (1.8.2) and then rebooted my Mac and, thankfully, the Wacom is now working ok with Affinity. As you can see from my earlier posts, I have adjusted my RAM usage to 46080MB; whether or not that has helped, I haven't a "Scooby".

Just one other observation: in my Safari Preferences > Advanced, the "Stop plug-ins to save power" is ticked (active). Who knows if anything turns on that...

Best wishes

PaulMA

[Dan C]

@PaulMA That's wonderful news, many thanks for letting me know!

@SRU & @markw Thanks for your screenshots, I can see you both have Metal enabled with 2 GPUs that support this feature, and both cards may be conflicting with one another causing this. Could you please try disabling metal, restart the app when prompted, then try again for me?

many thanks for your continued patience and understand, it really is appreciated

[SRU]

@Dan C Thanks for your support.

Deactivating metal seemed to made it worse, unfortunately.

[markw]

30 minutes ago, SRU said:

@Dan C Thanks for your support.

Deactivating metal seemed to made it worse, unfortunately.

Same here, or at least no better.

[Dan C]

I'm very sorry to hear this is the case - I've been looking into this further through external channels and I've found a few reports of Wacom slowness within Catalina. Could you please try the steps outlined below and let me know if this improves things?

https://www.reddit.com/r/wacom/comments/eny0dy/serious_cursor_lag_in_macos_catalina_photoshop/fed7dke/

We are aware that with certain vector brushes, specifically larger/longer strokes that a lag can appear, with the stroke being drawn slightly behind the cursor. This is a know bug logged with our developers to be fixed and occurs with both mouse or touch-pad input, so please do be aware of this.

[markw]

Hi Dan,
You say that you are not experiencing as much brush lag as in SRU’s  screen recording shows, but I wonder if there’s any chance you could replicate that recording with one of your own for us to see by way of comparison how that vector brush performs for you?
I’m still on Mojave OS here so I don’t think this is a Catalina specific issue.
In fact it might be interesting to see a recording of how the brush performs on a similar spec Windows machine?
Like I said earlier in this thread, I have never really needed to make such a long continuous brush stroke while actually working on a project but this has piqued my curiosity now.

[SRU]

Nothing.
Can it be that the "3,1 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5" is just too slow?