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Affinity Apps Slow to Start on Beefy 2019 Mac Pro


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Hello,

I use Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher on both a 2017 MacBook Pro and a 2019 Mac Pro. Photo and Designer were purchased from the Mac App Store whereas Publisher was purchased directly from Affinity. As you can see from the screenshot below, my Mac Pro has plenty of power with a 16c Xeon, 384 GB RAM, and the AMD Vega II GPU. Yet, for some reason, it takes a good 25 dock bounces for any Affinity app to start on my Mac Pro whereas it's noticeably quicker on the less powerful MacBook Pro. Both are running the latest macOS Big Sur.

Are there any ideas as to why this is? Any steps I can take to improve launch times on my Affinity apps? 

It's worth noting that I rarely reboot my Mac Pro, so the laggy launch time occurs even when the app has been opened and closed multiple times over the course of many days. 

Screen Shot 2020-12-28 at 7.15.32 PM.png

Screen Shot 2020-12-28 at 7.11.11 PM.png

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Well Big Sur (which is still far away from being bug free or optimal stable) and a first time universal (fat) binary app. Both have first to evolve to some degree!

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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You can try but with caution, see the PRAM/NVRAM reset note about having a wired Apple keyboard there ...

... additionally you can try removing and reinstalling of the Affinity v.1.8.6 software or perform a fallback to v.1.8.4 in case you have a time machine backup of those etc.!

See also these topics:

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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Thank you so much for your responses. I will work on these suggestions today. It makes sense that the issue is something global, like PRAM or SMC, because ALL my Affinity apps have this issue, two of them coming from the Mac App Store and one coming from Affinity itself. Will report back here with results. 

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On 12/29/2020 at 6:39 PM, Eusebius said:

Hello,

I use Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher on both a 2017 MacBook Pro and a 2019 Mac Pro. Photo and Designer were purchased from the Mac App Store whereas Publisher was purchased directly from Affinity. As you can see from the screenshot below, my Mac Pro has plenty of power with a 16c Xeon, 384 GB RAM, and the AMD Vega II GPU. Yet, for some reason, it takes a good 25 dock bounces for any Affinity app to start on my Mac Pro whereas it's noticeably quicker on the less powerful MacBook Pro. Both are running the latest macOS Big Sur.

Are there any ideas as to why this is? Any steps I can take to improve launch times on my Affinity apps? 

 

This issue is now known for 1.5 months. Another thread on it can be found here: 

It is reported by many people, with various configurations, and acknowledged by Serif. The problem however is that there is still no sign of any solution.

@stokerg , any update on perspective of time to resolution? It's nice that it is in Dev team for investigation, but it is so already for 1.5 months and not much is happening there. And if there is, some communication on what is happening would be appreciated.

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Thank you for this update. I'm glad it's not just me. Hopefully, Serif's developers will get to the bottom of this issue soon. What I find perplexing is that my powerful Mac Pro is slow whereas my MacBook Pro opens Affinity apps much faster. Both are running the same version of Big Sur!

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  • 2 months later...

Hello, again,

We are here at the end of March and I would like to report the situation persists with me. On both our 2019 Mac Pros (an 8-core with 64 GB RAM and Radeon 580x and a 16-core with 384 GB RAM and a Radeon Vega II), the Affinity apps are painfully slow to load up. 

I was under the impression that the latest update fixed that issue, but it doesn’t seem to be the case with me. 

FYI, I’m running the App Store versions of Photo and Designer, and the direct version of Publisher. 

Any ideas?

Thank you 

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El 20/3/2021 a las 18:31, Eusebio dijo:

Hola, de nuevo,

Estamos aquí a finales de marzo y me gustaría informar que la situación persiste conmigo. Tanto en nuestros Mac Pros 2019 (un 8 núcleos con 64 GB de RAM y Radeon 580x y un 16 núcleos con 384 GB de RAM y un Radeon Vega II), las aplicaciones Affinity son dolorosamente lentas de cargar.

Estaba bajo la impresión de que la última actualización solucionó ese problema, pero no parece ser el caso conmigo.

Para su información, estoy ejecutando las versiones de App Store de Photo and Designer, y la versión directa de Publisher.

¿Alguna idea?

Gracias

26 March 2021 the problem still continues, I have a MacBook Pro i9 2020

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 1 year later...

I "had" the same problem with my new M1 Max MacBook and I tried a couple of suggestions I found here in the Affinity forums and while one suggestion (copy app to Desktop, rename or delete original app, copy app back to Applications folder) cut the start up time almost in half, it still took quite a bit longer then Publisher which opens in 2 secs.

So I was looking in the Preferences in Designer and I noticed that Display rendering was set to OpenGL so I changed it to Metal and restarted my MacBook Pro and Designer and Photo now open in 2 sec. just like Publisher.

Hope this helps everyone!

Screen Shot 2022-05-17 at 9.25.29 PM.png

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