Affinity 1.9.1 SLOW AS HELL. It is sad to say, but I won't recommend this suite anymore.

[Venyer]

I have been experiencing problems since last summer. This is getting so frustrating that I have decided that I won't recommend this program anymore.

I have the three programs besides the three workbooks. I am really dissapointed. I have been beta testing for months and it seems the problems are unsolvable. The beta version works better than the stable version.

 

[walt.farrell]

If you're on Windows, and you have Hardware Acceleration enabled in Preferences, Performance, have you tried disabling it?

[Venyer]

Hi @walt.farrell: yes, I have tried almost every option with no luck. It looks that nvidia acceleration doesn't work in the stable version while it is working perfectly in the beta version.

I had reported this weird behaviour several times. It looks that there is something in the stable compilation that is not on the beta. I am really dissapointed.

I have been recomending the programs to lots of people since I bought them years ago... but no more. I get all kind of bad comments from people who tried to change their workflow from Adobe to Affinity following my advice recently and that it is a real pity.

[Swehunt]

I just installed 1.9.1.979 and tried focus stacking with hardware acceleration and now is works fine for me. (I have a Nvidia GTX TITAN X card) 

[Roqoco]

10 minutes ago, Venyer said:

Hi @walt.farrell: yes, I have tried almost every option with no luck. It looks that nvidia acceleration doesn't work in the stable version while it is working perfectly in the beta version.

I had reported this weird behaviour several times. It looks that there is something in the stable compilation that is not on the beta. I am really dissapointed.

I have been recomending the programs to lots of people since I bought them years ago... but no more. I get all kind of bad comments from people who tried to change their workflow from Adobe to Affinity following my advice recently and that it is a real pity.

Is also working on my nvidia 1080 late jan driver. Also 1.9.1 appears faster and more stable (failure to save and other problems appear to be fixed). Might be worth posting your specs.

[ronald618]

So far 1.9.1 is working fine for me. Mac M1.

Smooth and fast. The constant beachballs are gone!

[Minus44]

Working great here. Might even be a bit faster on my Mac.

[Venyer]

9 hours ago, Roqoco said:

Is also working on my nvidia 1080 late jan driver. Also 1.9.1 appears faster and more stable (failure to save and other problems appear to be fixed). Might be worth posting your specs.

I am using Win10pro on a xeon e31240v2, 32gb of ram, ssd and a Nvidia 1660ti with the latest drivers.

I am glad to hear that the program runs well for you. The 1.9 branch has so many problems that it is really hard to make any serious work with it.

For now, I am using the beta version which runs much faster.

[Paul Mudditt]

18 minutes ago, Venyer said:

I am using Win10pro on a xeon e31240v2, 32gb of ram, ssd and a Nvidia 1660ti with the latest drivers.

I am glad to hear that the program runs well for you. The 1.9 branch has so many problems that it is really hard to make any serious work with it.

For now, I am using the beta version which runs much faster.

Did you try running the benchmark tool under the Help menu, might be worth taking a screen shot after running and posting it here.

 

[Venyer]

2 minutes ago, Paul Mudditt said:

Did you try running the benchmark tool under the Help menu, might be worth taking a screen shot after running and posting it here.

 

Several times. Here are the latest results:

[firstdefence]

No consolation to you but I have a 2011 iMac High Sierra and Affinity runs very well within the limitations of the hardware. In the latest release v1.9.1 Filters such as Eye-Candy continue to work, which is different than v1.9.0 where Eye-Candy didn't work but did work in the 1.9.x beta. 

On my iMac 2015 Affinity is silky smooth, but I have deliberately stayed on High Sierra because it's just nice and stable. 

[Paul Mudditt]

Your results are much better than my PC version Intel I5-7400 32GB + GTX 1650. But my PC works well. Also here is my M1 for comparison and why I prefer that.

 

[firstdefence]

Clutching at straws here but do you Antivirus (AV) running? could you add Affinity to a whitelist and/or an exclusion list or temporarily disable the AV to test. If you close any an all non-essential apps does that make a difference, if it does there may be a conflict between apps that are running. 

[Venyer]

22 minutes ago, Paul Mudditt said:

Your results are much better than my PC version Intel I5-7400 32GB + GTX 1650. But my PC works well. Also here is my M1 for comparison and why I prefer that.

The M1 seems to be a great machine. My computer is good enough to run AP and I was really happy when I tried the beta because it really improved its performance and some other bugs but my surprise was when I installed the 'stable' and the performance was really really low... Unusable.

11 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Clutching at straws here but do you Antivirus (AV) running? could you add Affinity to a whitelist and/or an exclusion list or temporarily disable the AV to test. If you close any an all non-essential apps does that make a difference, if it does there may be a conflict between apps that are running. 

I have it disabled and I have tried running the program with almost no proccesses running in the background with the same results.

[Paul Mudditt]

I created the Metal compute test (attached) that James demonstrated, here is a recording of performance on my I5 and it isn't too far behind my M1. How  do you have your performance parameters set up?

EDIT: I could not screen record on PC using the NVIDIA game recorder as performance slowed dramatically so used my iPhone.

metal compute test.afphoto

[firstdefence]

2 minutes ago, Venyer said:

I have it disabled and I have tried running the program with almost no proccesses running in the background with the same results.

I can see why this must be so frustrating for you considering your system spec Affinity should fly.

 

[Paul Mudditt]

18 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Clutching at straws here but do you Antivirus (AV) running? could you add Affinity to a whitelist and/or an exclusion list or temporarily disable the AV to test. If you close any an all non-essential apps does that make a difference, if it does there may be a conflict between apps that are running. 

Yes I agree, I was surprised that my NVIDIA screen recorder could not cope and slowed Affinity right down.

[Paul Mudditt]

9 hours ago, Venyer said:

The M1 seems to be a great machine. My computer is good enough to run AP and I was really happy when I tried the beta because it really improved its performance and some other bugs but my surprise was when I installed the 'stable' and the performance was really really low... Unusable.

I have it disabled and I have tried running the program with almost no proccesses running in the background with the same results.

M1 is great, for £699 (EDIT: for the radgie gadgie) you get a great machine at a fraction of the cost of an equivalent PC. Don't think that's ever been said about a MAC before! I only keep the PC for COD.

[Roqoco]

2 hours ago, Venyer said:

Several times. Here are the latest results:

Here are my results:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/dEwfH1CwhkDsU56K8

I notice that my results for 1.9.1.979 release version are similar to your beta results (with a few anomalies, my processor is now > 6 years old and GPU several gens old). This suggests (captain obviously) that something went wrong on your setup between beta and release, but my results I think suggest that it isn't necessarily a problem with the Affinity release itself.   

BTW a new Nvidia driver was released on the 25th. I used this in the benchmark.

Just a random thought - I know that Windows pro has some quirks, for instance they recently released a restrictive safety extension that some users found hard to completely eliminate... Anyway, it seems to me that given the experiences of others with the windows version your problem is most likely due to some incompatibity or glitch with something in your specific configuration. Not easy to tie down what that might be.

my system:

Core i7-3770 (this is old now around 2014), 16gb, GTX 1080, Windows home.

 

 

[buschbrand]

2 hours ago, Paul Mudditt said:

Did you try running the benchmark tool under the Help menu, might be worth taking a screen shot after running and posting it here.

 

I can find no benchmark tool under the help menu … or is it a BETA thing?

[Paul Mudditt]

1 minute ago, buschbrand said:

I can find no benchmark tool under the help menu … or is it a BETA thing?

Are you using V1.9?

[Roqoco]

8 minutes ago, buschbrand said:

I can find no benchmark tool under the help menu … or is it a BETA thing?

In affinity photo?

[RNKLN]

In the Help menu, indeed. Only available when there's no document open. On Mac, at least.

[Paul Mudditt]

Available BEFORE you open any documents as mentioned above. Mac and PC and iPad.

 

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, Paul Mudditt said:

M1 is great, for £600 you get a great machine at a fraction of the cost of an equivalent PC.

Not direct from Apple, who currently charge half as much again for the base configuration (8GB RAM + 512GB SSD); doubling the amount of RAM and the SSD size adds another £400 (i.e. £200 + £200) to the price price. And that’s for the system box on its own, so you have to factor in the cost of a monitor and keyboard if you don’t have spare ones lying around.