[FAQ] Performance Related Issues

[Lee D]

Affinity apps are designed to use both CPU and GPU to process and render on screen. Overall performance will differ from system to system due to differences in hardware and available system resources. The OS can also play a part in how well an app will perform, always ensure that no matter which of our supported operating systems you have installed that it is fully up to date with all available updates. You can also check to make sure that the system is also running the latest video card drivers.

There are several options listed in Preferences > Performance that can be adjusted to increase the performance of Affinity apps on your system. They are:

• RAM usage: By default it’s set to the amount of RAM your system has, some users have reported getting better performance by adjusting this slider. However we do have conflicting feedback , some report increased performance when lowering and others when increasing this by small increments.
   
• Display/Renderer: (On screen rendering only)
  • Mac users: Ideally this wants to be set to Metal if available, if you do encounter any issues try setting it to OpenGL.
  • Windows users: Like above this ideally wants to be set to the primary graphics card installed in your system. Also check with your video card manufacturer to ensure you have the latest drivers available. If you are experiencing crashing when creating documents, panoramas etc, try changing this to WARP.
     
• Hardware acceleration
  • macOS: Most modern Macs will have Metal compute available and this should be enabled. However if you do experience issues it’s worth turning off and comparing performance.
  • Windows: In the 1.9 update to Affinity and option to enable OpenCL hardware acceleration was added in line with new features being added to Windows and compatible display drivers. If you do notice performance issues, please try disabling OpenCL within the app and test. It's also worth checking to make sure the graphics drivers are the latest available.

 

• View Quality: Try reducing View Quality from Bilinear to Nearest Neighbour.
   
• Retina Rendering: Try reducing Retina Rendering from Automatic to Low Quality (fastest).
   

Please note: Some performance issues can relate to individual files or resources used within your particular document. In these cases we prefer a copy of the file, if possible, for testing - once testing is complete any files will be deleted.

Start-up times: It's not something we have a lot of control over, however our apps do load fonts during opening. If you have a lot of fonts installed this will have an effect on the apps opening time and it may be worth reducing the amount of installed fonts.