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AMD Radeon RX Hardware Acceleration


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On 8/4/2022 at 9:15 AM, nitro912gr said:

I though about having 2 different GPUs to avoid this stupid problem in my other system where I have the 5500XT, I was told that it is possible to have an nvidia alongside the amd GPU and check in affinity to use the nvidia one.

Stupid? yeah, but it can be a temporary solution till serif decide to tell us more on the topic or fix it with amd, if you still have the 1060 around.

I had the same idea already but I don't think I'm going to fiddle with that, the drivers will definitely have some conflicts with one and another and getting them to work somehow together is not a task I'm willing to dedicate time towards. In the case it will somehow work with the Affinity Suite, there still can be problems because I do also game on this PC and in this case driver conflicts are more prominent and annoying to deal with. But also: 2 GPUs wont't fit in my PC case anyways.

I'm also heavily disappointed in the way serif is handling this issue, instead of giving your mature audience the freedom to enable this feature even if it crashes your software, they are holding hands and prohibit any interaction. A better way would've been a warning message you can dismiss and still enable it to see for yourself if the new driver update has fixed the OpenCL bug or not.
I hope this issue is getting fixed soon, because it seems - if it is still a problem at all - it is something serif can fix, other software I use which utilise OpenCL, do not have any issues with my AMD GPU (DaVinci Resolve for example).

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I‘ve recently upgraded to a Radeon 6800XT from an older Nvidia card and I got strange flickering all over the screen.

After some google searches I found the culprit. In my AP settings Open CL was activated, but it‘s not available with the 6800XT, so AP automatically switched to the onboard graphics card with a lot horrible performance. I‘ve read through the whole thread here and now I know that there is actually no solution and that I‘m not alone with this issue.

I can‘t believe this problem remains unfixed since 18 months. I love Serif for their software and I need AP almost every da . What do I i do now with my expensive new GPU without hardware acceleration? I‘m shocked, just shocked… How is a big mess like this even possible for 18 months without a fix? I desperately hope they will fix it soon…

Edited by SCS80
Typo
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This needs to be fixed ASAP, a lot of my multi-layer projects just look like this in task manager and when I try to do something it freezes my entire PC for a few seconds:

image.png.00dc70ed67555b0a3f59dd3180f979e9.png

my poor Ryzen 7 3700X can't handle this.

I literally cannot work under these conditions and until the problem is fixed I will probably have to switch to an Adobe subscription, I would like to avoid this...

 

My System for reference:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X / 8C/16T
RAM: 32GB / 3200 MHz
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT / 16GB VRAM

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5 minutes ago, deejumpz9m said:

Yep, they need to fix this. I’ve switched over to a 3080TI and still can’t have OpenCL activated. It just keeps crashing. Coming from a 5700XT, I thought it would fix my issues. 

Wait, what? You are unable to turn on GPU acceleration on Nvidia too? What the h is going on in Serif?

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yeah wtf? can anyone else with nvidia 3XXX confirm this?

Current Workstation:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5500 - MOBO: Asus B450 - RAM: 16GB DDR4 2667Mhz - GPU: AMD Radeon 7850 1GB
NVMe SSD: Crusial P3 1TB M.2 -  SSD: Samsung Evo 850 256GB  - PSU: XFX TS450 - OS: Win10

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16 minutes ago, slizgi said:

Wait, what? You are unable to turn on GPU acceleration on Nvidia too? What the h is going on in Serif?

I can have it enabled, but the app literally crashes with anything that I do. It’s fine with it disabled, but why bother upgrading a GPU, if I’ll get similar performance as my previous one...

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I can only advise everyone to stay away from Affinity products on Windows. Since it has not been managed in 18 months to solve the problem. 

I am back with Adobe, not everything is perfect but it runs and is stable even with large projects.

I will no longer install the software on my Windows computer.

Still wish everyone here the best for your projects.

Best regards

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I‘ve sent them the following message via Facebook and linked this thread, because I don‘t know if anyone is following this. We have to let them know, that we‘re out there and struggling. I don‘t know why Serif doesn‘t care about this problem since such a long time. I‘m so disappointed, but I don‘t want to give up hope…

 

„Hello, 

I‘m a big fan of your software since some time and I absolutely love it and told everyone loudly.

A couple of days ago I‘ve upgraded my rig from an old Nvidia card to a brand new Radeon 6800XT, just to find out, you‘ve disabled Open CL for all newer Radeon cards. This was a shock and I‘m still shocked, because I can‘t go back to Nvidia now.

The problem remains unsolved since 18 months now and there are a lot of people despaired like me. Loyal supporters and customers like me, who even bought all your DLC, just to support you.

Please, please, please fix the hardware acceleration for AMD cards! I‘ve told everyone how great your software is and now I‘m left alone like this.

We‘re many and we don‘t know what to do now. You want us to go back to Adobe? Your loyal customers? Because this is what happens, if there is no light ar the end of the tunnel: we’ll go back to Adobe and you’ll lose us forever. No one wants that to happen! Don‘t leave us out there in the cold. Protect your hard earned reputation, that clearly took damage because of this! 

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/136068-amd-radeon-rx-hardware-acceleration/page/6/

Kind Regards„

Edited by SCS80
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11 hours ago, SCS80 said:

We‘re many...

I do not think we are many.
Now what I will say next it is pure speculation and only my point of view on this situation.
I think Sarif had way higher expectations about their software adoption to the Windows platform, and probably it is very small, compare to the macOS or iPadOS. If I can guess, Win is probably under 5% of all Affinity users - unfortunately. So there is no big pressure, and it is not economically sensible to solve this in a quick manner - unfortunately it creates an egg and chicken problem. And overall it is rather small company. I would not be surprised if internally Sarif regret doing windows releases and when we get Affinity Suit 2.00 there will be no windows release of it, I hope not but...
One last thing is that even today requirements on a product page are still not changed, and mislead new customers about possible hardware acceleration, this fact is just bad!

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1 minute ago, slizgi said:

I do not think we are many.
Now what I will say next it is pure speculation and only my point of view on this situation.
I think Sarif had way higher expectations about their software adoption to the Windows platform, and probably it is very small, compare to the macOS or iPadOS. If I can guess, Win is probably under 5% of all Affinity users - unfortunately. So there is no big pressure, and it is not economically sensible to solve this in a quick manner - unfortunately it creates an egg and chicken problem. And overall it is rather small company. I would not be surprised if internally Sarif regret doing windows releases and when we get Affinity Suit 2.00 there will be no windows release of it, I hope not but...
One last thing is that even today requirements on a product page are still not changed, and mislead new customers about possible hardware acceleration, this fact is just bad!

I don't think it's anywhere near as low a percentage as that. Look at the number of posts on respective platforms and products for bugs.

msedge_Y0N9eop8Sn.png.f5bdf2b0e73c50f5664c2269047801aa.png

 

 

msedge_oVaJgH4kJr.png.660a3214d952902a7c6e66f3f3f73756.png

 

 

Yeah you could argue the Windows version is more buggy, but it would have to be 10x more buggy for 5% share which makes no sense and it's much more likely to be a very similar number of issues.

Obviously only Affinity know the numbers, but it's not a tiny percentage like 5%

 

 

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3 minutes ago, slizgi said:

I do not think we are many.
Now what I will say next it is pure speculation and only my point of view on this situation.
I think Sarif had way higher expectations about their software adoption to the Windows platform, and probably it is very small, compare to the macOS or iPadOS. If I can guess, Win is probably under 5% of all Affinity users - unfortunately. So there is no big pressure, and it is not economically sensible to solve this in a quick manner - unfortunately it creates an egg and chicken problem. And overall it is rather small company. I would not be surprised if internally Sarif regret doing windows releases and when we get Affinity Suit 2.00 there will be no windows release of it, I hope not but...
One last thing is that even today requirements on a product page are still not changed, and mislead new customers about possible hardware acceleration, this fact is just bad!

Sound about right, it is difficult to break the stupid stereotype of graphic designers use Adobe, but it is even more difficult to break the stupid stereotype graphic designers use mac. Not to mention the mentality that if you are a pro PC user you gonna have nVidia GPU. I mean sure the sector have issues :P

That being said I have to admit I'm right around the corner to jump back in the apple ship after the M1 chips, the only thing that hold me back is that I have already invested in 2 AM4 systems with cheap upgrade paths and the stupid no upgrade at all path of apple devices so what you buy is what you have for the rest of it's life (and ffs 16GB of RAM for an extra 300 euros?)

Current Workstation:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5500 - MOBO: Asus B450 - RAM: 16GB DDR4 2667Mhz - GPU: AMD Radeon 7850 1GB
NVMe SSD: Crusial P3 1TB M.2 -  SSD: Samsung Evo 850 256GB  - PSU: XFX TS450 - OS: Win10

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1 minute ago, nitro912gr said:

Sound about right, it is difficult to break the stupid stereotype of graphic designers use Adobe, but it is even more difficult to break the stupid stereotype graphic designers use mac. Not to mention the mentality that if you are a pro PC user you gonna have nVidia GPU. I mean sure the sector have issues :P

That being said I have to admit I'm right around the corner to jump back in the apple ship after the M1 chips, the only thing that hold me back is that I have already invested in 2 AM4 systems with cheap upgrade paths and the stupid no upgrade at all path of apple devices so what you buy is what you have for the rest of it's life (and ffs 16GB of RAM for an extra 300 euros?)

Well lets be honest here, the vast majority of the people who have bought AF products did so because they are astronomically cheaper than Adobe products and do a similar job. Those people wont have 20-30 times that amount of money to buy new graphics cards or new computers just to run Affinity products. If they did, they would have stuck with Adobe products. Yes there are exceptions, but it's the low cost that brings almost everyone to AF products.

Not totally related to what you've said, but slightly. It also addresses someone further up who was suggesting buying a new NVidia card for ~£1000 for a product that costs £25 when on sale. Crazy.

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15 minutes ago, ziplock9000 said:

Well lets be honest here, the vast majority of the people who have bought AF products did so because they are astronomically cheaper than Adobe products and do a similar job. Those people wont have 20-30 times that amount of money to buy new graphics cards or new computers just to run Affinity products. If they did, they would have stuck with Adobe products. Yes there are exceptions, but it's the low cost that brings almost everyone to AF products.

Not totally related to what you've said, but slightly. It also addresses someone further up who was suggesting buying a new NVidia card for ~£1000 for a product that costs £25 when on sale. Crazy.

Can't disagree with that, the low entry price make it easy to jump in. Also the big sale point was that designer (that I use mostly) perform 10fold better and utilize the modern hardware, unlike adobe illustrator that refuse to see more than a core (not that designer use them all the time, but I have noticed way more utilization and many times hit 100% of CPU usage).

But the hardware that is having problem now is not some cheap intel integrated GPU, are top tier AMD cards and that's what it bites hard.

And atm I honestly believe that AMD GPUs are offering a better value than nVidia (that had the audacity to charge 200 euros for 1630). That being said I don't disagree that changing GPUs is not the way to fix to the problem, if you are not about to upgrade anyway.

Anyway, the biggest issue here is the lack of input from serif themselves, they don't say anything about it here, they don't even bother to upgrade the system requirements so people at least know, they still state that all you need for GPU acceleration is a DX 12.0 GPU.

And honestly I think the apps now are leaning more heavy on GPU than on CPU because with no GPU acceleration the performance is horrible, something that I didn't noticed before they introduce GPU acceleration.

Edited by nitro912gr
forgot a not

Current Workstation:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5500 - MOBO: Asus B450 - RAM: 16GB DDR4 2667Mhz - GPU: AMD Radeon 7850 1GB
NVMe SSD: Crusial P3 1TB M.2 -  SSD: Samsung Evo 850 256GB  - PSU: XFX TS450 - OS: Win10

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21 minutes ago, nitro912gr said:

And honestly I think the apps now are leaning more heavy on GPU than on CPU because with no GPU acceleration the performance is horrible, something that I didn't noticed before they introduce GPU acceleration.

GPU acceleration has been a thing for at least 15 years now, it's been a standard not optional in products that process video or graphics for a long time really.

I use a lot of software products that use GPU acceleration and AF products are the only ones that have an issue with my AMD card.

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I‘ve got a fast reply from Serif, but I‘m disappointed, because they blame AMD. This is what I got:

 

„Hi Stefan, thanks for your message! I can confirm that Hardware Acceleration is disabled in Affinity with these cards due to a bug in the AMD OpenCL drivers - meaning unfortunately AMD need to repair this issue and not Affinity. 
Our head developer on Windows has been in contact with AMD to discuss this issue, and has provided a full benchmark here - https://github.com/MarkIngramUK/ocl-compile-benchmark
As can be seen in these results, older AMD cards, Nvidias GTX 1660 & even Intel CPUs average around 20-50ms for OpenCL compiling. The RX5700XT took on average 1400ms. This shows that it is not the Affinity app at fault, and AMD need to provide a fix.
I hope this clears things up!“

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6 minutes ago, SCS80 said:

I‘ve got a fast reply from Serif, but I‘m disappointed, because they blame AMD. This is what I got:

 

„Hi Stefan, thanks for your message! I can confirm that Hardware Acceleration is disabled in Affinity with these cards due to a bug in the AMD OpenCL drivers - meaning unfortunately AMD need to repair this issue and not Affinity. 
Our head developer on Windows has been in contact with AMD to discuss this issue, and has provided a full benchmark here - https://github.com/MarkIngramUK/ocl-compile-benchmark
As can be seen in these results, older AMD cards, Nvidias GTX 1660 & even Intel CPUs average around 20-50ms for OpenCL compiling. The RX5700XT took on average 1400ms. This shows that it is not the Affinity app at fault, and AMD need to provide a fix.
I hope this clears things up!“

please follow up with that other applications have somehow fixed this problem so how is it still on AMD's side if others made it work?

I still don't understand why the silence here.

Current Workstation:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5500 - MOBO: Asus B450 - RAM: 16GB DDR4 2667Mhz - GPU: AMD Radeon 7850 1GB
NVMe SSD: Crusial P3 1TB M.2 -  SSD: Samsung Evo 850 256GB  - PSU: XFX TS450 - OS: Win10

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33 minutes ago, ziplock9000 said:

I don't think it's anywhere near as low a percentage as that. Look at the number of posts on respective platforms and products for bugs....

Absolutely fair point! Yet, it could be misleading if on Win are far more bugs than on macOS. Sarif itself can have more experience in Apple ecosystem plus use some solutions or used in the past that are not available in same form on Win, and has to undo them and redo differently.
Only they know how universal and platform independent of their code is, maybe windows versions are rather a type of "ports" that are made after macOS version is established - it has to be like that before the first Win version was released, now it might be parallel.
One thing that is strange for me, is that hardware acceleration that uses OpenCL works on Radeon in Blender and DaVinci Resolve as far as I know, and probably a couple other applications too.

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29 minutes ago, SCS80 said:

I‘ve got a fast reply from Serif, but I‘m disappointed, because they blame AMD. This is what I got:

 

„Hi Stefan, thanks for your message! I can confirm that Hardware Acceleration is disabled in Affinity with these cards due to a bug in the AMD OpenCL drivers - meaning unfortunately AMD need to repair this issue and not Affinity. 
Our head developer on Windows has been in contact with AMD to discuss this issue, and has provided a full benchmark here - https://github.com/MarkIngramUK/ocl-compile-benchmark
As can be seen in these results, older AMD cards, Nvidias GTX 1660 & even Intel CPUs average around 20-50ms for OpenCL compiling. The RX5700XT took on average 1400ms. This shows that it is not the Affinity app at fault, and AMD need to provide a fix.
I hope this clears things up!“

They have always blamed AMD from the start. While there is an issue with the driver, developers of other products have not chosen to use this development path or have switch and have no issues.
They choose to use a broken API and refuse to use another one that works.

Because the issue has persisted for so long, the ball has firmly been in AF's court for a while now, not AMD.

Poop analogy incoming warning:
If I was a home decorator and the paint I had been using no longer works, I'd not keep telling my customers I can't paint their walls for over a year, I'd buy paint from another company. I'd also not tell customers to get another painter, just because I wont use paint from another company.

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12 minutes ago, slizgi said:

Absolutely fair point! Yet, it could be misleading if on Win are far more bugs than on macOS. Sarif itself can have more experience in Apple ecosystem plus use some solutions or used in the past that are not available in same form on Win, and has to undo them and redo differently.

It would have to be 10x more to account for the number of bugs but still have a 5% share; unlikely to the extreme really. In a proper development environment, the people working on the Windows version will be experienced in the Windows development ecosystem so that should not be an reason either. 


 

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2 hours ago, slizgi said:

One thing that is strange for me, is that hardware acceleration that uses OpenCL works on Radeon in Blender and DaVinci Resolve as far as I know, and probably a couple other applications too.

Blender uses HIP on AMD hardware, which is a CUDA competitor. HIP runs on AMD and Nvidia GPUs, it even has an automated CUDA to HIP source code converter, so there is absolutely no excuse to not include this acceleration technique in your application if it already has CUDA support!

image.png.d01698d563fd939ac32cbb1718fb4ca0.png

And yes DaVinci Resolve has zero issues with AMDs OpenCL driver, it performs a lot better on my new AMD GPU compared to my previous Nvidia 1060.

The fact that the Affinity suite is the only software collection which has these problems makes me believe that this is not an AMD problem at all, just an excuse to not bother fixing the bugs for which Serif don't care much about.

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Honestly amd driver team is a joke, it's been four years since RX5000 launch, and they still can't fixes their opencl driver. 

I used to reports blender opencl bugs to both blender dev and amd, amd said they gonna fixes it, but nothing get fixed. Amd & blender basically gave up on opencl, and switch to amdhip. Which mean older blender binary/projects are still unusable on RX5700 series. It took forever to compile cycles opencl kernals, significantly slower than my old gtx750ti from 2014 lol.

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On 7/3/2022 at 10:35 AM, dnwls said:

 just tried the 1.9.0.932(which still allow amd rx5700 opencl acceleration), the gpu acceleration seems working fine to me, much faster than without gpu acceleration enable. 

update on this, some of the more complex brushes are slow with rx5700 acceleration, slower than ipad lol. Seem to have some delay on first brush stroke, compiling opencl kernal?

Definitely not the best user experience, I can understand why serif disable opencl acceleration.

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I‘m switching back to a Nvidia Geforce 3080ti and give the Radeon 6800xt to my son. This hurts me financially and I‘m just doing it out of despair. I could scream…

I‘m a music producer and since I‘ve installed the Radeon my DAW (Cubase) has hickups too, as if the AP issues weren‘t enough... I didn‘t change anything except the GPU, so I guess the Radeon is to blame.

I also have a Radeon in my gaming rig and I have zero problems there. Zero! Works like a charm and that’s why I thought, it’s a good idea to get one for my work PC as well. I didn‘t expect the trouble.

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22 hours ago, SCS80 said:

I‘m switching back to a Nvidia Geforce 3080ti and give the Radeon 6800xt to my son. This hurts me financially and I‘m just doing it out of despair. I could scream…

I‘m a music producer and since I‘ve installed the Radeon my DAW (Cubase) has hickups too, as if the AP issues weren‘t enough... I didn‘t change anything except the GPU, so I guess the Radeon is to blame.

I also have a Radeon in my gaming rig and I have zero problems there. Zero! Works like a charm and that’s why I thought, it’s a good idea to get one for my work PC as well. I didn‘t expect the trouble.

Unfortunately seems like AMD is focusing only on gaming lately. Which is stupid since they have very good computing performance for years now, way before applications start using GPU computation. It feels even more stupid that now that more and more apps use the GPU and even support something else than CUDA (that works only with nvidia) AMD fail to utilize their own hardware.

I would get an nvidia 1630 for my workstation but nvidia pricing is outraging as they ask 200 euros for this low end GPU. I hope the GPU price crash will get it where it belongs in the sub 100 region in a few months.

Current Workstation:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5500 - MOBO: Asus B450 - RAM: 16GB DDR4 2667Mhz - GPU: AMD Radeon 7850 1GB
NVMe SSD: Crusial P3 1TB M.2 -  SSD: Samsung Evo 850 256GB  - PSU: XFX TS450 - OS: Win10

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