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Poor Performance on MacOS and Apple M1


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I bought another licence for Affinity Photo today to use on my new MacBook Pro with M1 chip. Since the Windows licence does not work on Mac OS.

The performance for rendering an HDR image from 9 frames is a horror on the MacBook Pro. It takes 37 seconds on a Ryzen 7 with 8 cores. On the M1 216 seconds. According to marketing, the M1 is superior to the x86 architecture...

Will there be any optimisation for the Apple M1 from Serif?

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I would say there will eventually be optimization and native support for M1, unless of course they plan to stop developing for Mac OS, which I doubt.

You are an early adopter to a new CPU from Apple, you are going to have to expect some draw backs for the moment I think. I believe Affinity like other apps are running in a sort of emulation, though I could be wrong about that. That being said I am not sure what you are describing is normal with the new chip. Hopefully someone else with an M1 chip can confirm similar performance, and if not then I would probably try a clean install, wiping everything away and reinstalling the app and see if that helps. 

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4 hours ago, wonderings said:

I would say there will eventually be optimization and native support for M1, unless of course they plan to stop developing for Mac OS, which I doubt. You are an early adopter to a new CPU from Apple, you are going to have to expect some draw backs for the moment I think. 

Not exactly the story Serif is telling and selling with big letters:

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  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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4 hours ago, the_tux said:

The performance for rendering an HDR image from 9 frames is a horror on the MacBook Pro. It takes 37 seconds on a Ryzen 7 with 8 cores. On the M1 216 seconds. According to marketing, the M1 is superior to the x86 architecture...

☛ 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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The results of lot Benchmarks showing a better performance of the Apple M1 as other CPUs. The Marketing tells also that the M1 ist the best option for performance.

A Lot of Youtuber shows also amazing Performance results.

Serif told also that the Performance of their products is great with an M1. But now i bought a MacBookPro with M1 and installed Affinity Photo on a clean system. The result is poor.

The HDR stacking needs nearly 6 times longer as on an older AMD Ryzen CPU.

At the end, the solution to create HDR from a exposure series on Tour has failed and the old workstation will not be replaced.

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Well, benchmarks are always such a thing, there are synthetic and more extensive application-relevant benchmark suites. So the results from benchmark to benchmark can sometimes vary and differ extremely. A Ryzen CPU often performs better here in more complex, real life application-relevant benchmarks.

Related to a M1, you can't measure just with Affinity apps here, it might be just plain ported/adapted over (or have still bugs) and thus might not be that much specifically optimized for the M1 architecture. - For the HDR stuff other hardware factors beside the CPU/GPU and possible metal usage might play a role too, like overall RAM, the image sizes and mem used for HDR tasks, is Metal acceleration used or not etc.

☛ 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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Both systems uses the same amount of ram. The Ryzen system uses a HDD Raid 1 and the MacBook a SSD. 

But a difference of factor nearly by 6 is a very big cap.

I tested the same HDR rendering process with a 2018 IPad 11 Pro and this is a little bit faster as the M1 MacBook. The iPad has definitly less power.

So I hope the performance issue is only a bug and will fixed asap.

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I do not have a virus scanner yet. Today I completely reset the macbook pro and only carried out the initial setup without importing a backup.
The result is the same. 
Is there a difference between installing Affinity Photo via the AppStore or downloading and installing it directly from the customer account?
Is it possible that the version in the customer account is not the native M1 version?

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AFAI recall M1 support started with v1.8.5, so anything >= that version should be a multiarchitecture binary (fat binary) installer file, which can also be determined by its size ~ >700 MB then. On MacOS there is also the CLI lipo command line tool, it can tell you (and lists via -info | -detailed_info) which architectures binaries & libraries do include.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
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3 minutes ago, the_tux said:

The installed Version is 1.9.1 and the result of lipo: Architectures in the fat file are x86_64 arm64

So both architectures are inside Intel x86_64 and M1 arm64!

☛ 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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On 3/1/2021 at 6:39 PM, the_tux said:

I bought another licence for Affinity Photo today to use on my new MacBook Pro with M1 chip. Since the Windows licence does not work on Mac OS.

The performance for rendering an HDR image from 9 frames is a horror on the MacBook Pro. It takes 37 seconds on a Ryzen 7 with 8 cores. On the M1 216 seconds. According to marketing, the M1 is superior to the x86 architecture...

Will there be any optimisation for the Apple M1 from Serif?

It might be worth uploading your images here for others to check on their M1 systems if you like. A quick test of the Workbook beach 8 image HDR stack was 14 seconds on my M1 Mac mini.
 

EDIT: 20 seconds including automatic ghost removal

I used these workbook images :- https://affin.co/hdr

 

My dad always told me, a bad workman always blames their tools….

Just waiting for Ronny Pickering…..

Affinity Photo, Designer, Publisher 1.10 and 2.4 on macOS Sonoma 14 on M1 Mac Mini 16GB 1TB
Affinity Photo, Designer, Publisher 1.10 and 2.4 on Windows 10 Pro. Deceased
Affinity Photo, Designer, Publisher 2.4 on M1 iPad Pro 11” on iPadOS 17.4 
 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/AffinityForiPad

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The hardest link to find https://affinity.help

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6 hours ago, wonderings said:

I stand corrected! Would be interesting if there was some sort of bench mark file to test for those with the M1.

Like the benchmark tool built into V1.9? Mac, PC iPad and M1 results here.
 

 

 

My dad always told me, a bad workman always blames their tools….

Just waiting for Ronny Pickering…..

Affinity Photo, Designer, Publisher 1.10 and 2.4 on macOS Sonoma 14 on M1 Mac Mini 16GB 1TB
Affinity Photo, Designer, Publisher 1.10 and 2.4 on Windows 10 Pro. Deceased
Affinity Photo, Designer, Publisher 2.4 on M1 iPad Pro 11” on iPadOS 17.4 
 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/AffinityForiPad

https://www.facebook.com/groups/AffinityPhoto/

The hardest link to find https://affinity.help

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The Beach Workbook files are only jpeg. With 7 jpeg images (each approx. 6 MB / 15 Megapixels) this is no problem. Even an old Casio calculator can do that within 20 seconds ;)
The above times were measured with a batch of 9 RAW images (each approx.24 MB / 24 Megapixels). But even with this size, 8GB RAM should not be a problem or bottleneck. Under Windows and a Ryzen, it's fast.

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12 hours ago, the_tux said:

The Beach Workbook files are only jpeg. With 7 jpeg images (each approx. 6 MB / 15 Megapixels) this is no problem. Even an old Casio calculator can do that within 20 seconds ;)
The above times were measured with a batch of 9 RAW images (each approx.24 MB / 24 Megapixels). But even with this size, 8GB RAM should not be a problem or bottleneck. Under Windows and a Ryzen, it's fast.

So are you able to upload your images to be used as a benchmark so the devs can check on any further optimisation? Maybe they are too large for the forums.

 

My dad always told me, a bad workman always blames their tools….

Just waiting for Ronny Pickering…..

Affinity Photo, Designer, Publisher 1.10 and 2.4 on macOS Sonoma 14 on M1 Mac Mini 16GB 1TB
Affinity Photo, Designer, Publisher 1.10 and 2.4 on Windows 10 Pro. Deceased
Affinity Photo, Designer, Publisher 2.4 on M1 iPad Pro 11” on iPadOS 17.4 
 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/AffinityForiPad

https://www.facebook.com/groups/AffinityPhoto/

The hardest link to find https://affinity.help

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Hi @the_tux I used to be quite into HR photography in older times so, with my M1 mini (16GB RAM, 2TB SSD, ~1TB free) and your sample files, I decided to give this a try.  I simply created a new HDR Merge and added the Automatically Remove Ghosts option to the default settings.

hdr.png.fcb6feac16e35c2673a3e5422fb981e0.png

The first time I ran this, I reckoned it took 51 seconds to reach the main Tone Map screen on which I could click [Apply] or [Cancel].

I quit Photo and relaunched it and ran the test again.  Now that I was familiar with the steps in the process, I wanted to pay closer attention.  This time it came out at 44 seconds.  Either quitting the app and relaunching it failed to clear something cached that helped with the slight improvement - or I misread the timing the first time around due to unfamiliarity with the steps.

Third attempt was also 43, maybe 44 seconds.  Quite different from your 216 seconds!

I wonder - how do my Performance settings compare to yours?

settings.png.df5acd72257a41a340c1f33acca1adda.png

 

—— Gary ——

Photo/Designer/Publisher: Affinity Store, v2.1.1 release

Mac mini (M1, 2020), 16GB/2TB, macOS Ventura 13.4.1(c) • MacBook Pro (Intel), macOS Ventura • Windows 10 via VMware Fusion • iOS: current release

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Hallo Gery, i used the identical settings. I tried the HDR Merge again and the time is the same. The activity monitor is also fine. CPU Usage is around 8 Percent and the memory is also 70 percent.

I think the ram is not the bottleneck. And the CPUs are the same (M1, 8CPU, 8 GPU).

Where Do you downloaded your version? Do you installed it about the Apple App Store or downloaded from Serif?

Is there a difference between battery powered or with a connected power supply unit?

I attached also a screenshot of the Affinity Photo Benchmark from my MacBook

Bild 04.03.21 um 07.05.jpg

Edited by the_tux
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4 hours ago, the_tux said:

Is there a difference between battery powered or with a connected power supply unit?

For common notebooks usually yes, since if working unplugged they then try to save battery power (dimming screen and limit performance slightly etc.). If the M1 based notebooks behave the same way here, run throttled then, I can't tell for those newer hardware devices. - I recall however that I've seen somewhere benchmarks results, where for a nearly equally equiped M1 based MBP and a M1 based Mini, the Mini was always a little bit faster, meaning gave slightly higher scores.

Now here in the above comparison cases, assuming both devices would run at their full speeds, if the needed memory to operate a bunch of probably huger RAWs is higher than usual, the available amount of RAM might play some role too. Other than that, faster SSD access (read & write speed) will play some role too.

☛ 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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@v_kyr
The system with the Ryzen has 8 GB RAM (under Windows) and a hard disk. The MBP has the M1, 8GB RAM and an SSD.
I also added the Affinity Photo benchmark of the Ryzen. The numbers are worse, but the Ryzen still renders classes faster than the Apple M1.

@GaryLearnTech
The difference between a MacBook Pro and a MacMini, both with Apple M1, is not that big. At least that's how it is seen by all the Youtubers.
There might be a difference in the memory between 8GB and 16GB, but not that big.

Do you installed Affinity Photo from Apple's AppStore?

20210304_174349.png

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On 3/2/2021 at 7:09 PM, Paul Mudditt said:

It might be worth uploading your images here for others to check on their M1 systems if you like. A quick test of the Workbook beach 8 image HDR stack was 14 seconds on my M1 Mac mini.
 

EDIT: 20 seconds including automatic ghost removal

I used these workbook images :- https://affin.co/hdr

Sorry, but the jpeg's maybe fast. But as a photographer i don't work with jpeg's. 

I think you Mac with the Apple M1 CPU should a special version from Apple. Your machine can't processed the HDR combination wihtin 20 seconds. Today i checked the HDR processing in a store on a Apple MacBookPro with 16GB RAM and 1 TB SSD. And the processing time was 213 seconds. So the procesing of both machines are nearly the same.

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Hi @the_tux  sorry for not responding sooner.  First of all, here's my benchmark data. I did nothing to try to optimise it - there are various apps and utilities running in the background, just my normal work environment.  The readings are pretty close to yours.  Yes - my Affinity Photo was bought from Apple's Mac App Store.

2021-03-05_23-06-27.png.389fbf5b603b04ef8f146b22b7c013c0.png

 

I had an idea to record the process for several reasons.  First is in case I'm timing a slightly different set of steps to you - remember I did say that my serious interest in HDR photography was way in the past, so I might have misunderstood something here and ended up with a slightly different set of steps.  But this also includes readings from App Tamer, showing CPU utilisation of key processes.  In this case, it's not 'taming' anything - it's simply monitoring.  I set it to measure once per second.  I would not pay much attention to the "% Avg" column - that was set to calculate  the average CPU over 5 seconds.

The black line in the graph shows the sum of all processes.  There will be a small overhead from various background processes but, during the recording, that should be pretty constant. The key processes to watch are Affinity Photo itself, as well as  kernel_task - it looks as if the main app hands off some of the job to somehow be processed by the kernel.

This should not be taken as scientifically accurate, it's not designed for that, but it should allow us to see the process in a little more detail.  (Incidentally, this time around it ran slightly slower than when I originally timed it - 50 seconds as opposed to the earlier 44 seconds - but I'm not going to lose sleep over that.)

—— Gary ——

Photo/Designer/Publisher: Affinity Store, v2.1.1 release

Mac mini (M1, 2020), 16GB/2TB, macOS Ventura 13.4.1(c) • MacBook Pro (Intel), macOS Ventura • Windows 10 via VMware Fusion • iOS: current release

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Quote

Cinebench version R23 results

Multi-Core (M1 with all 8 cores):

Ryzen 9 5900X  - 21153 points (Desktop-CPU)
Ryzen 5 4600H  -  8370 points  (45-Watt-Mobil-CPU)
M1 Mac Mini     -  7786 points
MacBook Air     -  7425 points  (the passively cooled Air throttles at first run, afterwards < 6300 points)
Core i7-10750H -  6300 points  (45-Watt-Mobil-CPU)
Intel-MacBook  -  4955 points

Single-Core-Performance:

Ryzen 9 5900X  - 1585 points  (Desktop-CPU)
M1 Mac Mini    - 1572 points
Intel-MacBook  - 1092 points

 

Translated benchmark test (into english) which compares M1 results to other CPUs for the Cinebench benchmark ...


Further if you compare the CPU Cinebench R23 (Multi-Core) and Cinebench R23 (Single-Core) results, you will see that most mediocre to advanced Desktop-CPUs easily surpass the M1 performance and offer much more punch than a M1.

☛ 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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