Affinity Photo Windows Customer Beta - 1.9.0.791

[Mark Ingram]

Click here to download the latest beta

Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: New features, performance, fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback. 

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.

Fixes

• Fixed hang when using hardware acceleration
• Improved hardware acceleration
• Fixed Studio Presets allowing names that contains invalid path characters

1.9.0.780 release notes

[AiDon]

Doesn't seem to be any improvement in the problems with NVIDIA GPUs.

[Chris B]

27 minutes ago, AiDon said:

Doesn't seem to be any improvement in the problems with NVIDIA GPUs.

The nvwgf2umx.dll crash? That's unrelated to the hardware acceleration but we do keep seeing it pop up a lot. Hopefully it will be resolved in due course.

[Bruno Henrique]

want to implement the option to export and import in studio presets?

[Patrick Connor]

34 minutes ago, Bruno Henrique said:

want to implement the option to export and import in studio presets?

That will likely come in a later version, yes.

[Equalizer]

Unfortunately no improvement in the errors with built-in Intel HD graphics.

My processor has an Intel HD 530. As with Affinity Photo Version 780, opening an image takes too long with activated hardware acceleration. It takes about 3-4 seconds for the image to be displayed in the Develop Persona. When it is displayed, the image is initially greyish, pale and far too dark and cannot be edited. Another 3-4 seconds pass. Only now is the picture displayed normally. And only now can you edit it. When operating the individual controllers in the Develop Persona, the program takes 1-3 seconds to think about each controller until it implements the controller changes.
The hardware acceleration is still absolutely unusable. Without hardware acceleration, everything works as usual.

Edited October 15, 2020 by Equalizer

[Fritz_H]

@Mark Ingram
Suggestion:
since the list of changes and fixes just shows issued you are already aware of:

How about more information which new/changed/experimental features you want us to test in more detail?

something like: "We changed the <e.g.> blur-filter. How does it perform on your system? Are you satisfied with the result?"
and perhaps even offer a survey-form for those points of your interest?

For example: you posted: "added hardware-acceleration".
great!  but... for which features? what in detail should be faster now? what exactly do you want us to test and report?
Zoom-in/out speed?  Filters sped up? etc..

This forum is very busy - I guess you know, that most of us want to help to improve your product.

 

[Mark Ingram]

Thanks @Fritz_H. Unfortunately in this case it really is a "general" improvement to the underlying architecture. Things are "different" now, hopefully in a good way. But play around with brushes, filters etc, see how they compare to before.

[Equalizer]

I agree that it would make more sense to give more information about the new functions of what exactly has been changed in order to better coordinate the tests and give better feedback about the functionality.

[Frozen Death Knight]

Tried testing super fast brush strokes performance and from my own perspective it seems to have improved a bit. Not completely fixed, but it seems harder to reproduce the unresponsive UI performance issue I reported last time (still a bit laggy sometimes, but at least the UI can be clicked on after a second or two unlike the previous Beta). What hasn't been fixed is some brush strokes being considered as one history state, since I was able to create 2+ strokes = 1 history state when making super fast strokes in the current Beta. It is going in the right direction, so keep tinkering some more there and we should be golden eventually.

One aspect that can however be slow still is when painting/drawing while using some adjustment/live filter layers on top of that layer, especially in larger projects. However, I don't think there is any true solution to this by improving GPU acceleration, but instead adding more tools for layer management. I.e. adding a global disable/enable all adjustments/live filters that you can toggle on and off to optimise your project. I know we have alt clicking thumbnails, but that method only works for individual layers. For larger projects it gets more complicated, especially since you can't alt click groups and then work on the contents within said group by clicking on one of those layers (the isolation resets). Alternatively you add the ability to create embedded documents directly from the Layers panel like how Photoshop does it with smart objects. Since performance is also related to the amount of layers you have inside a single document, being able to divide up your project into different documents would be a good solution for dealing with these types of slowdowns.

Ideally I would like to see both of these features to deal with this performance problem, but the latter would honestly be my top priority because of how useful creating embedded documents/smart objects from the Layers panel actually is other than just performance boosts.

[Uwe367]

Tested the new Beta with enabled hardware accerleration and RAW Development works so fast as never before. From ~17-18 seconds to ~2-3 seconds.... Wohooooo. My PC can fly 😂
Well done guys 👍

[Equalizer]

Hi Uwe,

what exactly has become faster? Can you describe that in more detail? You surely don't mean the complete RAW development... What kind of hardware CPU/GPU do you use?

[Uwe367]

@Equalizer

I mean the time from clicking the Button "Develop" in Develop Persona till open/transfer the RAW after editing in Photo Persona.
In earlier Versions without hardware accerleration this time was on my system ~17-18 seconds and now it needs only ~2-3 seconds.
This is, in my opinion, a very big improvement.

My CPU is an AMD Ryzen 5 2400G and my Graphic Card is a GeForce GTX 1060 6GB with Studio Driver.

 

[Equalizer]

Uwe, thanks for the answer.
I just tested this too. Without OpenCL 6.03 seconds, with Open CL 2.66 seconds. So it's really much faster.
However, OpenCL does not work properly with the Intel HD 530, there are still too many bugs that make it impossible to work with hardware acceleration at this time.

[rushingabout]

have tried several times, cannot download latest beta update .91 of my Beta version of photo it just returns setup failed. I am running the latest purchased program .703 Shall I just wait for another update or reinstall the Beta version.

[walt.farrell]

31 minutes ago, rushingabout said:

cannot download latest beta update .91 of my Beta version of photo it just returns setup failed

I suggest trying the instructions in the FAQ:

 

[Mark Ingram]

1.9.0.815 is now available.