Is it worth me investing in a GPU

[LochNess Me]

I'm not a gamer so I know little about GPUs, but I use AP a lot and for some operations like inpainting and HDR stacking it's quite slow. It can also get a bit slow to react sometimes when I'm manipulating adjustment layers.

I'm running Windows 10, have 16GB RAM which rarely goes above 60% use even when AP is at it's maximum churning and have an SSD installed.

With the 1.9 update is it worth me investing in a GPU, say <£100. ??

[Catshill]

I considered doing the same but after reading about folk disabling hardware acceleration for stability reasons, I decided to leave well alone and save my time and money.

[GarryP]

Unless you have an unusual hardware set-up then you probably already have a GPU.

• Open the Windows Start menu;
• Scroll down to Windows Administrative Tools and open that item;
• Scroll down and click on System Information;
• Wait for the application to refresh its information;
• On the left, open the Components item and click on Display (application view will refresh again).

On the right will be listed the GPU(s) that your system has.
You can then do a web search on the name of a GPU to get more information on it.
(Close the System Information application when you are finished with it.)

[Roqoco]

19 hours ago, LochNess Me said:

With the 1.9 update is it worth me investing in a GPU, say <£100. ??

Low end GPUs <100 will likely have only 1-2gb of vram, probably not enough, when running at higher resolutions (over say 720p), to get a significant performance boost. So likely you would need to spend a bit more than that to get a noticeable difference, assuming those functions you mentioned would actually be helped by a GPU, which I don't know.

[Catshill]

The GPU world is aimed at gaming rather than imaging which makes it challenging to identify suitable cards. My system is a ten year old i5 2500 with SDD HD but is still fast so unsure about the right (if any) upgrade route.

[IanSG]

On 2/11/2021 at 10:31 AM, Roqoco said:

Low end GPUs <100 will likely have only 1-2gb of vram, probably not enough, when running at higher resolutions (over say 720p), to get a significant performance boost.

Is VRAM the only significant issue if I want to see a performance boost from the graphics card in AP?   Like the OP, I'm considering installing a new graphics card, but I don't know what specs to focus on. 

8 hours ago, Catshill said:

The GPU world is aimed at gaming rather than imaging

True, but watch out for mining graphics cards - they're used for mining bit coin and don't have the monitor connections you might expect.

[Roqoco]

8 hours ago, IanSG said:

Is VRAM the only significant issue if I want to see a performance boost from the graphics card in AP?

 

The main function of a gpu is to accelerate the rendering of the frames in the frame buffer (vram) so as well as VRAM anything that helps games in that respect (cuda cores...) is likely to accelerate AP too when it needs to rapidly redraw. I suspect you can't go far wrong with any decent gaming card with at least 4gb vram, more if you are running 1440p or 4k. That said, you are hardly going  to benefit much from a very high end gaming card, because much of the functionality in Affinity is likely CPU bound any way and so can't be handed off to the GPU. I have a nvidia GTX 1080 with 8gb of VRAM, two generations old but still a decently fast card. I can't say that it has made a very noticeable difference having acceleration in 1.9, but then I have been using designer almost exclusively and that is less likely to benefit than photo, because manipulating vectors is more of a CPU intensive thing. Maybe someone who uses photo more could comment on any benefits they have seen?

[IanSG]

17 hours ago, Roqoco said:

I have a nvidia GTX 1080 with 8gb of VRAM, two generations old but still a decently fast card. I can't say that it has made a very noticeable difference having acceleration in 1.9, but then I have been using designer almost exclusively 

That helps to set my expectations - thank you! I'd hoped to get away with a 10 series card, but if that's not going to produce noticeable improvements....

[User_783649]

Affinity Photo currently is the only app out of the three that is able to fully utilize GPU processing power as it manipulates raster image data.
Designer and Publisher, being vector based editors, don't use GPU that much and do most of its rendering exclusively on CPU.

Hopefully, more GPU acceleration will be introduced to these apps in order to give them a performance boost as well. However, we should remember, that vector and raster data are two completely different worlds. And if raster data, by its nature, greatly suits for highly-distributed parallel computation devices (which GPUs are), vector data is a completely another story.

So, choose a good GPU option if you're mostly work in Affinity Photo. You'll get a great performance boost.
And choose a good CPU with high single and multicore speeds if you find yourself more often working in Designer or Publisher.

Anyone can see how different these apps perform on a such basic operation as applying Gaussian Blur to an object and moving it around.

Designer and Publisher use almost all of the CPU while GPU is not being used at all.
And Photo uses lots of GPU while CPU usage is actually 3-4 times lower than Designer and Publisher.
CPU and GPU graphs are available on the screenshots below, as well as process %CPU usage in Activity Monitor.

System specs: Intel Core i9-9900K, AMD Radeon RX 580.

Designer:

Spoiler

Photo:

Spoiler

Publisher:

Spoiler