Rel. 1.9.1 still crashing

[Sinforiano]

I just installed, Feb. 27, 2021, the new release, Rel 1.9.1, and it still crashes, same as 1.9.0.

When will this issue be solved?

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, @Sinforiano.

What OS do you use? Where did you purchase the application?

And how and when is it crashing?

"Same as 1.9.0" does not tell us anything, as you have never posted before about any issues.

[GlueFactoryBJJ]

walt.farrell,

Well, I'll add some context to this... at least in my situation.  With Affinity Designer.  I purchased both Designer and Photo directly from Serif and started with 1.8.0(?).

When I was running 1.8.5, I would OCCASIONALLY run into situations where the design just appeared to be too complex (too many elements) and it would crash.  Often this would happen if I combined (grouped) elements of two or more designs and/or pulling in a large number of elements from .EPS files.  I kind of assumed it was a memory leak issue because it would usually work after either restarting the app or restarting my PC.  However, if I could load it, I could save it (it didn't crash when I did the Save As).

Usually, I'd get most of my changes back through the "auto save" function. When I would start 1.8.5, it would say there was a saved version and ask if I would like to use it.

Once I "upgraded" to 1.9.x (.0 and .1), whenever I would open one of these complicated files, it would either crash outright (no error messages), or crash when I was trying to Save As, the file.  It SEEMS to work OK on a plain File, Save.  Also, the "limit" of number of elements in a design (e.g. combining two or more designs) seems to be pretty dramatically reduced.  When combining designs with a large number of elements (e.g. curved pieces, say in the 100++ range) the app crash with a lower number than with 1.8.5.  Also, EVERY attempt to Save As these files, assuming I can get them to open, results in an immediate crash.  And when I try to open the file again, it will not give me the prompt to open the recovery file, but will just open the original.

So, this is the "crashing" problem I have.  I can't say it is the same as Sinforiano's, but it is the one I'm having.  To make matters worse, the few files I have changed since "upgrading" to 1.9.x can't be opened with 1.8.5.  That would have been a nice thing to point out in the update.  So I'm stuck with not being able to do any work with these (fortunately few) files until this gets resolved.

To be clear, there are NO error message when the app crashes.  It is just gone, so I don't have any information to send or post.  This has happened on the three projects I have tried working on since upgrading to 1.9.0 and the exact same thing still happens on 1.9.1.

I have even tried uninstalling 1.9.1 and reinstalling it to see if that resolved the problem.  It didn't.

My system configuration is as follows:

AMD 3950X on ASUS Crosshair VIII motherboard
Gigabyte GTX 1080Ti (11GB)
64GB RAM
2TB M.2 NVME SSD Boot
2TB (4x500GB SATA Raid SSDs) Video/Photo/Illustration drive
Misc bulk storage (internal and external HDD)
Win 10 Pro

I hope this helps because I've become rather dependent on Designer (and use Photo on occasion) and I'd really like to get this problem fixed. 

FWIW, the reason I haven't posted about this before is (1) that other things have come up and (2) I figured that since it was a .0 release that there would still be a couple bugs hanging around that would be handled in a .1 release.  In my case, THIS problem wasn't fixed.

Now I'm at the point where I need to use Designer again and I've uninstalled 1.9.1 and reinstalled 1.8.5.

Scott

PS.  On a similar note, could Affinity (Serif), PLEASE make a back up copy of the working file on saves so that if we made changes, we wouldn't inadvertently save over the original when we meant to save it to another name (e.g. File, Save rather than File, Save As).  I just lost all of my work on a file because I "auto piloted" a File, Save rather than a File, Save As (I started with a more complete file and deleted a bunch of it and then was going to click File, Save As, but hit Save instead (through habit).

Edited February 28, 2021 by GlueFactoryBJJ
Additional information

[v_kyr]

Did you checked if it is possible crashing due to enabled OpenCL hardware acceleration and misbehaving GPU drivers?

[GlueFactoryBJJ]

Sure, anything is possible.  However, I don't (knowingly) use OpenCL (unless Designer is using them) and I'm using the latest Nvidia GPU drivers.  I update the drivers monthly.  Just before updating, I was using 1.8.5 just fine on the same files that 1.9.x crashes on.

[Phil Robinson]

I use Affinity photo on two computers A Dell desktop Inspiron series and version 1.9.1 is virtually unusable on this system unless I disable the hardware acceleration then it seems to work fine for me. It runs very slowly and I kept getting the not responding message from windows.

My other system is a HP Pavilion laptop and this operates with no issues. I guess the graphics capability is much better (and newer)

[v_kyr]

In case the crashes are GPU driver related (if OpenCL is as default enabled) the following FAQ gives some advice for manual fixing ...

• [FAQ] How can I disable OpenCL compute acceleration on Windows?

In the meantime I've build a little Windows support tool (see: Affinity OpenCL Disabler), which might help here to automatically disable those possibly as default enabled hardware acceleration settings. The tool unchecks/disables the OpenCL setting ("<UseHardwareAcceleration>False</UseHardwareAcceleration>") in related PerformancePreferences.xml settings files for all Affinity release apps it can find (except Beta versions) on a Windows operating system.

[GlueFactoryBJJ]

I'd like to thank the fellow users who have posted to try to solve this problem. I just wish that there was a Serif presence here to respond...

Anyway, I have good news.  I tried reinstalling 1.9.1 and disabled OpenCL in the Edit, Preferences, Performance settings.

When I opened the "Problem" files, Designer crashed immediately. 

Then I tried using "WARP" rather than the "NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1080ti" option. It still crashed.

Frustrated, I started to recreate the work I had done previously. I was able to complete the project without problem.

From what I can see at this time, it looks like the earliercrashes during save corrupted the "saved" files. That is why they were crashing on opening them.

IMO, Serif needs to handle the crashes better. However, disabling OpenCL does seem to have fixed the problem... at least as far as I have tested it right now. I'll know more once I work on additional projects.

v_kyr - thanks for the great post on how to resolve the problem.

FWIW, at least in my experience, OpenCL has been problematic on Windows machines for over 10 years. Because of this, I'm going to skip OpenCL for at least the foreseeable future... until I can see a notable performance boost and/or Serif requires it to run the program.

Thanks!

Scott

[walt.farrell]

17 minutes ago, GlueFactoryBJJ said:

I just wish that there was a Serif presence here to respond...

There is a strong Serif presence in the forums, but it can take awhile for them to get to any particular topic as they are very busy handling all the problem-related topics generated by the issues in the 1.9 and 1.9.1 releases. When they get to a topic (especially in the Questions forum), if they find that the question has already been answered appropriately, they may simply move on to something else that still needs to be resolved.

[Sinforiano]

On 2/27/2021 at 4:44 PM, Sinforiano said:

I just installed, Feb. 27, 2021, the new release, Rel 1.9.1, and it still crashes, same as 1.9.0.

When will this issue be solved?

At the time I was testing the app, March 2021 I bought Affinity and updated to 1.9.2.

This is the equipment I have:

Configuration: Device name    DESKTOP-ILC624I
Processor    Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-1005G1 CPU @ 1.20GHz   1.19 GHz
Installed RAM    8.00 GB (7.78 GB usable)
Device ID    692D545F-030B-48EB-837A-3320A788ED0A
Product ID    00325-96735-20643-AAOEM
System type    64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch    No pen or touch input is available for this display

Edition    Windows 10 Home
Version    20H2
Installed on    ‎2021-‎02-‎17
OS build    19042.985
Experience    Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.2020.0
 

Since I bought Affinity, it has crashed or made my pc irresponsive and have had to force a shut down and restart the PC. I have not noticed any pattern to the crashes as they happen both in Photo and Develop Persona and so far it has been while trying any option on either personas.

Is there a way to obtain a memory dump or a file containing any information which can help determining the problem?

Any suggestions?

 

[Sinforiano]

On 2/27/2021 at 5:31 PM, walt.farrell said:

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, @Sinforiano.

What OS do you use? Where did you purchase the application?

And how and when is it crashing?

"Same as 1.9.0" does not tell us anything, as you have never posted before about any issues.

I purchased March 2021. At the time I posted my comment I was testing the app.

This is the equipment I have:

Configuration: Device name    DESKTOP-ILC624I
Processor    Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-1005G1 CPU @ 1.20GHz   1.19 GHz
Installed RAM    8.00 GB (7.78 GB usable)
Device ID    692D545F-030B-48EB-837A-3320A788ED0A
Product ID    00325-96735-20643-AAOEM
System type    64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch    No pen or touch input is available for this display

Edition    Windows 10 Home
Version    20H2
Installed on    ‎2021-‎02-‎17
OS build    19042.985
Experience    Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.2020.0
 

Since I bought Affinity, it has crashed or made my pc irresponsive and have had to force a shut down and restart the PC. I have not noticed any pattern to the crashes as they happen both in Photo and Develop Persona and so far it has been while trying any option on either personas.

[walt.farrell]

@Sinforiano: From the menu, select Edit > Preferences and look in the Performance section. Near the bottom, do you have Hardware Acceleration enabled? If so, disable it and see if things improve. If disabling the Hardware Acceleration helps, then you may need to update your graphics (GPU) drivers. There are many drivers which claim to support the functions that Affinity has started using since 1.9, but have or cause problems due to errors in their support.

[Sinforiano]

Thanks for your response.

Yes, Hardware acceleration was On and I have disable it. I'll try it like this and see what happens.

I am looking at Device Manager and do not seem to find the graphic drivers, so if needed, where are they, so I can update them?