Live Filter Performance in Photo and Designer (Persona)

[kaffeeundsalz]

Hi everyone,

I first noticed this in Affinity Publisher when switching between different personas. Live filters seem to have a much better performance in the Photo persona. With The Unsharp Mask filter for example, images update immediately when moving the sliders, making for a very smooth experience. In the other personas, screen update lags when I try this. Now, performance is not at all that bad; all personas are perfectly useable. But the difference is very noticeable.

On further examining the issue, I could also see the same behavior when comparing the standalone versions of Photo and Designer, although my (very subjective) observation is that the difference in performance might be slightly less obvious than in the Publisher personas. The rendering settings in Preferences > Performance are configured identically on my machine for all three applications. Is this expected? Can anyone reproduce? Is there a technical difference in how Photo, Designer and Publisher render Live Filters?

Cheers
kaffeeundsalz

[Lee D]

Can you let us know which OS you're using and the spec of your system.

[Pšenda]

On 10/15/2020 at 10:37 AM, kaffeeundsalz said:

Is there a technical difference in how Photo, Designer and Publisher render Live Filters?

Apparently there may be no difference in "how" live filters are rendered (I assume they will be the same functions/code), but rather it will depend on what else needs to be done at the same time in the given application/personas. Although even that this could/should be completely identical due to the unified concept of Affinity Suite applications.

[walt.farrell]

One difference between Designer and Photo is that Designer supports additional View Modes of Vector and Outline, vs Photo which supports only the Pixel View Mode.

You might try using View > View Mode to switch the Designer Persona (or Designer) to Pixel mode, and see if that makes a difference in the screen rendering speed.

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

One difference between Designer and Photo is that Designer supports additional View Modes of Vector

This could be a major difference, as "vector" rendering ( ADesigner and APublisher) will be more computationally intensive.